Film
BULLET FOR YOUR GUN (Drama, 15 min) 2008
GETTING SAM (Drama, 15 min) 2008
Lori and Mel are two typical New York City girls, with New York City girl problems. They meet after an extended break in their friendship to gossip over coffee about the latest developments in their lives. As the work and dating anecdotes escalate they come to realize that their newfound hope is not what it initially seemed. Performed as part of Me & Them #2 at Glasslands Gallery, Brooklyn.
Read the Getting Sam script
Watch the actors talk about their characters
THE MAN WHO HUNG HIS CLOTHES IN TREES (Documentary, 25 min) 2004
Article about Greeff in the UK Sunday Times
A note on process – see below*






THE PERFECT BUBBLE (Conceptual, 5 min) 2004
Three friends attempt to blow ‘the perfect bubble’. Though a bubble is by definition absolute, is there such a thing as a flawless creation? Is fulfillment found in result/aesthetic or in the act of doing? Cut to the Shirelles’ Putty in your Hands (listen to it here). The color is yet to be removed (cf. Gary Ross’s Pleasantville) to create black and white images but leaving the bubble in bright green, highlighting our helplessness in the paradox of the irrational pursuit of perfection. Inspired by Man Ray’s The Phenomenon of Ecstasy, a collage of people in the throws of rapture, that Dali accompanied with a call to action for pure imagery – ‘the blind lucidity of desire’.

A HIGHER PLACE (Comedy, 3 min) 2004
Referencing both The Young Ones and Dr Seuss, we follow the morning of a sulky teenage Jesus living in sin (in Finsbury Park, London) with Mary Magdalene, and his scuzzy flatmate. An all-seeing omnipresent God punishes his son’s acts of Free Will in various ways. When ‘J’ sneaks a look at the hottie on Page 3 a giant Crayola pencil is hurled from the sky (God likes crosswords). When he refuses to return home, he is met with a rainstorm that follows him everywhere he goes. Inspired by a sign outside a dilapidated Streatham church that read ‘Jesus Lives Here’.
Read the A Higher Place script



THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS (Drama/Conceptual, 10 min) 2003
A dialogue free film based around the question that the roles of self reference and self reflection play in the process of (re)invention. A girl sits, confined in a white room, trying to write a script. Gradually we see her ideas develop through a series of cliché fantasy sequences pasticheing certain genres (thriller, musical, romance). Eventually she realizes that the film she wants to make is the one that we are seeing as we return to the opening sequence.



MAKING TRACKS (Documentary, 45 min) 1999
In 1989 everyone in my primary school class was asked to write what they wanted to ‘be’ in a decade’s time and seal this secret in an envelope for their future selves. I found three of these childhood friends on the anniversary of the unveiling and filmed their surprise/sadness on being reminded by their child selves and their original ambitions.
I intercut interviews and current footage of them with footage of us as children, as well as interviewing kids currently at the school. The film opens as I revisit the rooms where I first learned how to read, write and make friends, accompanied by a voiceover of the headmistress’ speech from our leaving assembly in which she warned us about stepping into the adult world.
-Stills pending-
—————-
* The Man Who Hung His Clothes on Trees – A NOTE ON PROCESS: My Co-Director/Producer and I, Alice De Ville, spent a great deal of time researching the academic and political context of homelessness as well as spending extended time in the community – including going undercover at the South Bank and at guerrilla soup kitchens on the back streets of Victoria. We realised that it would take months, if not years, to properly ingratiate ourselves to a point of trust to be able to produce a film of adequate honesty working within the traditional remits of this type of factual storytelling.
As such, we went back to the drawing board and chose instead to educate my parents and two younger brothers on the issues we had researched, scenes we had witnessed and Greef’s personal history and made them, a stereotypical family (mimicking the audience watching) the questioners. We threw out conventional notions of documentary and turned the question round – would you invite a homeless stranger home for dinner?








