“I didn’t want it to be a film just about heterosexual love and a very conventional white wedding,” explains acclaimed documentary filmmaker Kim Longinotto of her sweeping new project Love Is All. “I wanted it to be about friendship and love of children, love of friends, same-sex marriage—I wanted it to be about all of those things.”
A blissful gambol through 100 years of British cinema, the film was assembled by Longinotto with her long-time collaborator and editor Ollie Huddleston after spending eight weeks trawling thousands of hours of footage from the BFI and Yorkshire Film Archives, and set to an original score by acclaimed English singer-songwriter Richard Hawley.
The little-known clips that emerged highlight the changing roles of women, same-sex relationships and an increasingly multicultural Britain. "I thought a lot over the past year that the way to deal with all this hatred that is going around is not through more anger," says Longinotto, who walked away with a World Cinema Documentary Directing Award at this year's Sundance Film Festival for her other offering, Dreamcatcher. "So it's a love letter to everything that’s good about England in 2015."
First romantic film that you remember watching?
Kim Longinotto: I have two really that I absolutely loved: the first is My Beautiful Laundrette, and I loved it because of the courage and bravery of the film, the freshness of it–and it wasn’t just about love. The second film—and both are films with same-sex relationships—is a Swedish film called Fucking Amal. It's about a love affair between two girls in a school, but also about one girl being bullied. She’s a sort of outsider and nobody likes her and the most popular girl in school falls in love with her, and it’s wonderful for that, really.
Most romantic scene in recent memory?
KL: There’s a wonderful romantic scene at the end of Boyhood when the main character and his female friend have just eaten some hash cookies and are in a canyon. The reason why I think it’s so romantic, even though they’re not really together yet, is because it’s about a boy who’s never felt part of anything and who has been constantly harassed and bullied by this succession of horrible fathers and then gets away to go to university and he finally finds soul mates. He goes for a walk with this girl and he says to her, “I’m completely in the moment,” and she says, “No, the moment is in you.” And you realize that she understands him and he understands her. It’s a wonderful moment when you meet someone and you realize that you kind of love them and they love you and you’ll probably always know this person because they understand you in some way.
And the most unexpected on-screen love scene?
KL: Film is so powerful and sometimes it is unrealistic, and this is one of the arguments I have with my housemate because I remember when we watched The Lives of Others, which is one of my all-time favorite films, and he said, “Oh it’s completely unrealistic, what Stazi guy is going to be changed by seeing other people’s lives? It’s just not going to happen.” But I said no, it was the idea of it that you could fall in love with people through watching them and then you change and it gives you your soul back. And that’s a metaphor for what film and articles and novels are trying to do. Another great example is Willow [from Buffy the Vampire Slayer]—I think it was a wonderful thing for girls that fancied other girls but felt bad about it and had nobody to talk to. Suddenly their hero Willow is with another girl [Tara]—that must have been wonderful.