Sex Crimes

These were my first two short films as Director, and they proved to be quite contentious. I was in a very extreme place at the time of writing and making them, brokenhearted and wild. I’d say I found out I was a director in making them, as the very raw emotional state I was in clearly communicated itself in the finished films. Responses were quite extreme. In a year when I had two feature length films showing at the Edinburgh Film Festival, the Festival producer turned these shorts down because she found them “unhelpful”. I still don’t know what she meant, but I guess she found them quite challenging. I remember a few months after making them, sitting with two film execs in a bar at the Berlin Film Festival, with both women arguing fiercely over which of the two films was really good and which was rubbish. I have to say I felt the films had done their job to cause such passionate debate. But the person I remember really “getting” the films was a secretary at Granada TV, where I was working on ‘Cracker’ at the time. She asked to see a tape and came away from the films very shaken up, not so much by the content but by the emotion they communicated. She said something like, I don’t know what you’ve been going through to make those films, and I thought at least someone understands. We had one private industry screening, and a screening at the ICA in London, but other than that they have had no public exhibition. It’s about time they found their audience. They are rough, raw, difficult and honest. I am proud of them.

Two short films – CONFORM and DEFORM produced in 1996

Written and Directed by Vincent O’Connell

Produced by Nick Love

Cinematography by Oliver Curtis

Starring Sadie Frost, Kate Hardie, Jonny Lee Miller and Sean Pertwee.

Vincent’s first two short films as Director, they are thematically linked stories of gender, sexuality and violence.

CONFORM stars Sadie Frost and Jonny Lee Miller and tells the story of two strangers who are violently arrested for unspecified crimes relating to their sexuality. In becoming incarcerated together, does their connection constitute rebellion or surrender?

DEFORM stars Kate Hardie and Sean Pertwee, and again involves two strangers forced together, this time by the obsessive stalking of a broken man. In an increasingly desolate landscape they expose their wounds.

The films are available for the first time to watch here. Please contact Vincent to request the password to view the film.

SEX CRIMES from Vincent O’Connell on Vimeo.

Vincent O'Connell

Sex Crimes

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