“In 2007 a collection of surveillance tapes, CCTV and hidden footage was sent to us anonymously. The past year has been spent piecing their story together. What follows is a result of that work.”
So begins David Holroyd’s debut feature film – an unsettling, low-budget thriller about the weapons of mass destruction controversy in the run up to the invasion of
If all this sounds familiar, that’s because the film, while fictional, is very much based on real events and facts and documents in the public domain. Curveball, the Downing Street Memo, the plagerised dossier and the
As intimated above, Holroyd, whose previous directing experience includes Hollyoaks, Footballer’s Wives and The Bill, shot the whole film on shaky surveillance and CCTV cameras. The meetings that decide the fate of an entire nation take place in the most ordinary of places – in the back of taxis, a café in Euston station, the British Film Institute’s bar and, in one instance, on a plane.
Played by the accomplished but unknown Simon Lenegan, Morgan is an all to familiar family man who is trying to balance his increasingly stressful professional work with the mundanity of his home life. An composite of various people involved with the intelligence gathering against
In a recent interview Holroyd noted he didn‘t want WMD “to be a documentary, but to be a drama.. I didn‘t want the film to be a polemic.” Despite this, occasionally there is a sense of explanations shoe-horned in to script more for the audience’s benefit, than for the characters doing the talking. However, this is a minor criticism – Holroyd has brilliantly synthesised a complex and confusing topic in to an engrossing 88-minute movie.
With the official
The next screening of WMD will be at Clapham Picturehouse in south
*Ian Sinclair is a freelance writer based in
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