Seacoal (1985)

Betty and her daughter Corinna are introduced to the harsh seacoaling way of life by Ray, an ex-seacoaler returning from a job with ICI. His offer of a caravan on a cliff top and promises of the Klondyke that awaits them at least seem preferable to the violent marriage she has left behind. The film sets Betty's struggle for survival against the wider struggles of the seacoaling community, surviving on the fringes of capitalism. Despite the exploitation by a local entrepreneur, run-ins with dole snoops and School Board men and the ever encroaching regulations of a hostile council, their lives retain a kind of anarchic romance, which is reflected in the film's lyrical style. The inspiration for Seacoal undoubtedly came from the staggering visual location in which it is filmed; the industrial landscape of power station and pit framing the blackened beach of Lynemouth where, for generations, local people and travellers have made their living from collecting waste coal washed ashore. Channel 4 wanted a feature film and Amber suggested this territory. A small commission for the Ashington photographer Mik Critchlow in the early 1980s had, in consequence, opened access to the seacoaling community at Lynemouth, where one of Mik's cousins, Trevor Critchlow, worked. The bleak energy of its raw capitalism had often attracted photographers, Chris Killip among them. The caravan Amber bought on the site housed Chris as he developed his photography project, Seacoal (1984), with its stark images of life at the margins. When he moved out, the Amber crew moved in, making a feature film of the same name, which was released the following year. Seacoal, Amber's first feature film represented a major step forward in its experimental mixing of drama and real life. The production team lived with the seacoalers on and off for two years, and the daily events of the camp were incorporated into the film as straight documentary, improvised sketches or fully dramatised reconstructions. Equity, the actors union, granted Amber special concessions to work with the seacoalers themselves on the condition that they did not script for, or direct them. Amber were unable to predict responses to the actors' lines, which meant that the scripting had to be done piecemeal as the plot developed. The technique paid off, however, in terms of the film's spontaneity. After screening on Channel Four, Sean Day Lewis, from the Daily Telegraph, while devoting most of his TV Choice column to this 'haunting unsung film', nevertheless expressed surprise that this was in spite of it being made by Amber Films, 'a co-operative too devoted to equality to acknowledge the existence of a director or cameraman.'