Zam Salim will attend the screening.
Part traditional mismatched buddy movie, part Charlie Kaufman-esque comic fable, Zam Salim’s Up There is possessed of a wit that is as dry as last year’s firewood. A bravura opening reel sets up a richly imagined afterlife – more spirit sapping purgatory than paradise – into which our protagonist Martin (Burn Gorman – possessor of one of the world’s great upside-down smiles) has just been cast. Tasked with helping other recently deceased adjust to life after death in hopes of graduating ‘Up There’, he is bewildered to be teamed with Rash (Aymen Hamdouchi), who proves as chipper as he is deadpan. When they lose a new arrival the film becomes a kind of slow motion road movie as the pair end up in the gloomiest seaside resort in Scotland. Cut from the same cloth as Nick Whitfield’s similarly inventive Skeletons, Up There mines a strain of peculiarly British whimsy in the face of some awful truths about existence and finds a sort of sweet solace in the most unexpected places. - Tom Hall, Filmmaker and screenwriter