A short film about the stories that coincide, overlap and clash in the big city. Not just in space but also through time...
Format: Short Film
Genre: Supernatural - Mystery - Thriller
Logline:
A young woman goes busking in her usual spot in an old brick
railway arch but this time she attracts a very unusual audience.
Screenplay written by Joe Ryan-Leah, based on the short story “Busking” by Joe Ryan-Leah
During the course of the film we discover that the spot she chooses to play her music (a large brick railway arch) is haunted by the ghosts victims of a Second World War air-raid.
Through Ruby’s point of view, the audience are fearful of these spirits and what their presence could mean, but discover at the end that they are benevolent and are themselves experiencing their own comfort and solace in Ruby’s music.
Along the way we meet other people in the tunnel who pass by and interact positively and negatively with Ruby.
By the end we observe that everyone in the big city is leading their own life and is involved in their own story.
Divisions and clashes may be familiar in any society, particularly built-up urban settings like the one in “Busking”. But right now much of the world feels undeniably divided, with people’s different personal experiences apparently impossible to reconcile.
To demonstrate how people of different backgrounds, with different interests, personalities and connections to the environment all co-exist seems a reasonable answer to the difficult questions of social conflict.
This is a story set in the present day but linking to a past time, just about within living memory. A time which conjures varying views of national identity, historical rights and claims to historical inheritance.
We suggest here that our personal stories are all playing out at the same time and overlapping, interacting and clashing. We simply render the ghosts of our mutual past literally, to explore acceptance and tolerance.
This story started life on the short-form horror story website Creepypasta.com where it received high praise and rating by users. Later it was turned into an audio-story on YouTube by two different content creators (identities unknown).
Written on a whim, for fun, I had been considering an interesting location which could provide fear and suspense. Someone on their own, vulnerable to the mistreatment of strangers, a busker, seemed like an interesting and original character, and their situation; at once on show to the world but very isolated seemed to me a fascinating setup for familiar feelings of awkward unease which could be magnified into tension and horror.
Years later I decided to turn this story into a live action short-film, and found this would necessitate changing some of the events, fleshing out the characters, creating a few new ones, and gradually the tone and theme of the story changed.
Originally the main underlying theme or message of the story was something to the effect of don’t judge others by what you see. But now has become an observation on the idea that in places like big cities everybody’s personal stories are infinitely overlapped with everyone else’s.