Film Report: The Last Photo
The last photo is romance/thriller set in a house in South London.
My protagonist is a young Pakistani female protagonist and I have used a female
to present the problems she is facing as an Asian teenage girl living in a
British society. The protagonist’s name is Hannah and she is facing reality
that she is unable to be with her boyfriend, she begins to get express how she
feels; through suicide. Her constant
emotions of being depressed foreshadowed a distressing end to her life.
Throughout the film, Hannah expresses a variety of sympathetic emotions based
on her how she feels about not being with her boyfriend and towards the end of
the film she begins to feel more stressed, leading to her final decision,
death. I used this particular
ethnicity and age of the protagonist to raise awareness of what girl’s go
through (of this background) being tied by their traditional strict ethnic
values, which contrasts with influence of modern western values. The film isn’t
clear as to why they are not allowed to be together, but I purposely left this
to be very open reason why they wasn’t allowed to be together for the audience
to uncover as there are many reasons. The end result is often the young girl
trapped; especially being of a young age where they are stuck between family
honour and the one they love, which leads to their vulnerable decision of
taking their life away.
For my AS Film Studies
production coursework, I wanted to create a short romance/thriller film of a
target audience of 14-20 years old. There are many micro features that display
the clear message of my film. E.g. this can be shown through performance as the
female protagonist expresses a continuous feeling of hopelessness. The main
theme showcased in my short film was depression, death and forbidden love.
Depression was represented by the performance of the female protagonist as she
was constantly crying and presented a miserable body language. Death was
displayed through her performance as she takes her life away by slitting her
wrist, left to drown in the bath, the water imagery symbolises purity, which
suggests that the protagonist wanted to end her life being pure as girl’s are
influenced to believe they are impure/shameful to commit into a relationship at
a young age.
