The Plague Watch a scene from Greg Hall's debut feature.

As I am sat on the eve of the release of my first feature, The Plague, my mind is in fact lost within the edit of my new feature Kapital. It often feels strange reflecting back to 2004, when The Plague first started a two-year run of festivals, and the process that got me to where I am now. The pivotal impact the film's response has had on my life, as a filmmaker and person, is testament to what can be achieved, creatively and cinematically, with enough passion and resourcefulness.

At the age of 22, I was finishing my film degree in June 2003. Having immersed myself in three years of Frederick Wiseman, the French New Wave, Situationist International and the unfolding War on Terror, I felt disillusioned at just entering an industry and having to "work my way to the top". Cinema is relatively infantile, although it has been innovated by many great masters, and film language like all languages ebbs and flows with the times. With cinema, as a culture, I wanted to go beyond the passiveness that the spectacle of film, due to its commodification and subsequent homogenization, often instils within an audience.

With this fiery passion came also honesty. I wanted to tell a story that would engage, something that would connect with the generation of hip-hoppers that I so identified myself with, and also express my experiences of growing up with my closest friends. I was always wondering where 'our film' was. I felt disconnected with the mainstream representations of youth culture that we are constantly saturated with, and instead decided to take action. So in the summer of 2003 I embarked on making a personal film that would vent my own experiences, and comment on the context that our stories live within. One thing was missing. Money.

We cast some of the key roles from untrained actors who could bring an authenticity to the film.

As I pinned a rejection letter from the UK Film Council on my bedroom wall, we began the three-week shoot of The Plague in September 2003, with a tiny crew of seven and a cast of over 60. At the end of art school, my editor Paco formed Collective Vision: a band of ten filmmakers under no manifesto, only the love of making films, and cobbled together the resources to do so. With my crew secured, and improvising around my first draft of a script, we cast some of the key roles from untrained actors who could bring an authenticity and realism to the film. Armed with a graduate loan, and money scraped together from family and friends, everyone worked for free yet all owned a percentage in the ownership of the final piece.

Filming on the fly, with no official permission, the shoot was an exhausting paradox of focused anarchy. The edit continued in this vein, cutting all night in various bedrooms across London, on a home PC with cracked programmes, while holding down day jobs. On 28th May 2004 we first screened the film. It went on to receive the Katrin Cartlidge award from Mike Leigh and screened at festivals across Europe, picking up more awards and lots of industry praise.

And now after two years of a rollercoaster ride, the story continues with the film's release nationwide. But the struggle also continues to secure enough cinemas willing to show low budget work. The film is testament to how digital technology makes filmmaking more accessible, and this can only be a bonus for the advancement of cinema as a culture. But what next? The digital revolution must occur within the exhibition and distribution of British films.

The Plague is released in UK cinemas on Friday 6th October 2006.

Greg Hall | Published 05 October 06

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