The Last Photo By Saira Begum

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.