'Just a story: Framing trauma within screenwriting practice'

Journal: International journal of screenwriting

Abstract:

As an adult undergraduate student in the UK city of Nottingham, I encountered an aggressive altercation with a child which challenged my sense of masculinity and perceptions of power. This traumatic encounter affected me deeply and continued to ripple through all aspects of my life including my screenwriting practice as a way to process and reclaim the powerlessness I felt during the event and notions surrounding it.

The creative culmination of processing this trauma was a screenplay which was produced as a short film ‘Soft’ (2006). This film resonated with audiences internationally. Peter Bradshaw of the Guardian wrote: “The film was not merely about violence but about something deeper, darker, more unsayable: a fear of our children, and older people's fear and hatred of the young.” (Bradshaw, P. 9 Jul, 2007) The film went onto to be nominated at numerous film festivals, and won the Sundance audience aware in 2008 and was Bafta nominated the same year. The creative screenwriting process offers opportunities to recount, recollect and dramatise experiences, although there is always an inherent tension between the dramatic imperatives of the form versus the authenticity of the lived experiences. Narratives drawn from direct experiences complicate the process as negotiation between recounted facts and narrative conventions occur in the search for some sense of authenticity however elusive that may be. This autoethnographic account will draw upon the encounter itself, the translation of that encounter into a screenplay. The tensions of framing the encounter into a specific format and what the experience of addressing this trauma offered to me in terms of process and meaning.

Source: Manual