Set in a small farming community in mid Wales, a place where Koppel’s parents – both refugees – found a home. This is a landscape and population that is changing rapidly as small scale agriculture is disappearing and the generation who inhabited a pre-mechanised world is dying out. Much influenced by his conversations with the writer Peter Handke, the film maker leads us on a poetic and profound journey into a world of endings and beginnings; a world of stuffed owls, sheep and fire. (Description from Letterboxd)
Trailer Breakdown
Opening Shot: A dog barks at a passing off-screen vehicle, the sound of its engine can be heard. As the engine gets quieter and presumably the vehicle moves further away, the dog settles down and a dog in the distance can be heard barking.
Title Card: Sleep Furiously. A film by Gideon Koppel. Music by Aphex Twin
Shot 2: A man stands beside a signpost pointing to Cwmsymlog, Cwmerfyn and Penrhyncoch. 3 distinctly Welsh place names that even to most Welsh people are likely obscure and unknown. The man reads a poem from a notebook he is holding, he speaks with a west country accent. He is in a light blue shirt, tucked into a faded and worn pair of jeans, tucked into a pair of wellys, behind him a dog can be seen wandering around. The poem tells the story of the old wooden sign post that stood before the metal one we now see ‘… for years it gave directions, as on the bank it stood…’
Shot 3: The voice of the man reading the poem continues over into this shot. An extremely wide shot looking out over a valley, a row of sheep march in a near perfect single file line across the frame. Over the shot we see a quote; ‘A beguiling, meditative study of the rhythms of rural life’ Wendy Ide, The Times.
Shot 4: We return to Shot 2 and the man reading his poem. ‘… till the day it fell apart, damp decayed and rotten…’
Shot 5: We return to Shot 3 and the sheep being marched across the valley, again the poem continues. Another quote; ‘Sublime’ Jonathan Romney, The Independent on Sunday
Shot 6: Back again to Shot 2. ‘… and put us up a modern one, upon a big steel pole…’
Shot 7: The cutting back and forth between Shot 2 and Shot 3 is finally broken. Instead we get a mid shot of a man stood side on to the camera, behind him we see a rugged Welsh mountainside. He whistles, presumably at the dogs who can be heard in the distance rounding up the sheep. The audio from the poem is not continued over this shot.
Shot 8: Back to Shot 3. Cementing the idea that the whistling man was a shepherd responsible for these sheep we now see. Another quote; ‘Lyrical and haunting… a love letter to a way of life’ The Hollywood Reporter. The poem resumes ‘… now there’s a signpost at the junction, at the bottom of our lane…’
Shot 9: Back to Shot 2. ‘… when the wind blows in the night, the pointers move around, ‘n Cwmerfyn’s where Cwmsymlog is, ‘n Penrhyn’ can’t be found. So now I look forward to, the day it’s old and rusted. And replaced with a wooden one, at least it could be trusted’.
Shot 10: A black sky suddenly illuminated by a series of fireworks shooting up vertically
Shot 11: More fireworks against a black sky. The opening notes of Aphex Twins Alberto Balsam merge in with the sounds of the fireworks being set off.
Shot 12: Another quick shot of fireworks soundtracked by Alberto Balsam
Shot 13: A final shot of fireworks exploding against the nights sky, the credits appear over the shot; Sleep Furiously. In Cinemas from May 29th. The Visit Wales logo and the website for the film. Alberto Balsam continues for a few more bars.
Final Shot: The music abruptly cuts. A freshly sheared sheep comes darting out of a shelter and jumps into the air, paired with the audio of a firework soaring into the air. The sheep leaps through the air and lands off frame.
Trailer Analysis + Key Moments in the Trailer
This is a short trailer, running at only 1:34, that consists of very few shots. There are around 9 Shots, 2 of which get cut up and returned to several times throughout the trailer. However, I feel that this trailer does do a good job of summarising the tone and themes of the film. The trailer definitely quickly conjures up the feel of a small, rural Welsh community – almost immediately with the sound design from the first shot.
The shot of the man reading his poem stood by the signpost confirms this. The placenames couldn’t be anywhere but rural Wales. But the man reading the poems is clearly not Welsh, he speaks with a west country accent – though his pronunciation of the placenames is near perfect. This brings on the themes of immigration. Koppel, the director of the film, is the son of two refugees (if I remember correctly they fled to Wales during the Nazis persecution of the Jews), one of the main characters in the film is his mother, who, like the man from the west country, has fully integrated with the Welsh farming community.
The opening title card interestingly includes the note ‘music by Aphex Twin’. Clearly Koppel, being a first time director at this point, wasn’t seen to be a big enough name to draw an audience so including the cult electronic artists name adds some star appeal. Aphex Twin also has links to Wales, he himself is from Cornwall, but he has Welsh family – his older sister is the Welsh Minister for Climate Change.
The following quotes which fill the trailer are also an attempt to add some credibility to the film, quotes from The Times, The Independent and The Hollywood Reporter; all fairly well respected and big names. This reliance on quotes is quite typical of both fiction and documentary trailers, especially from a relatively obscure director.
The very repetitive editing style also feels representative of the film, throughout the film we follow a mobile library that serves the community and there are many sections through the film where we watch the van winding up country lanes sound-tracked by the same opening bars of Avril 14th.
And finally, the poem which makes up the main chunk of exposition we get from the trailer perfectly captures the overall themes of the film, the slow death of the old ways and the reluctance to move on to what is new but also considered to be worse.
Rebuilding the Trailer, Closer to the Film (?)
As the trailer doesn’t feature a huge amount of content, instead of rebuilding the trailer, I made an alternative trailer.
In my version of the trailer I tried to use more clips featuring the central characters of the documentary; Koppel’s mother, and the librarian in charge of the mobile library.
I tried not to lean on the Aphex Twin association as much as the trailer I analysed and instead built the trailer around the audio from a scene from quite early in the film where we watch a choir practise.
I feel that my version of the trailer gives less obvious clues about the themes of the film, taking away the poem makes the themes of the past vs the present a bit less clear. However, there are still shots which indicate this, most of the people featured in my trailer are older, we see shots which evoke the rural and simple way of life, Koppel’s mother making a Victoria Sponge and putting it into a wicker basket, a shepherd rounding sheep in a competitive sheep rounding event, and a group of elderly women reminiscing over a series of photographs. None of these sum up the central theme as succinctly as the poem about the signpost, but I feel they hint at it enough.
Conor McBride 