Enys Men [DVD + Blu-ray]

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The sound department is an often overlooked part of a film crew, so an item like this is invaluable. com is an Introducer Appointed Representative of Pay4Later Limited, trading as Deko, which is authorised and regulated by the Financial Conduct Authority (FRN 728646).

Filmed on location around the disused tin mines of West Penwith, it is also an enigmatic ode to Cornwall’s rich traditions of folklore and the region’s rugged natural beauty. Jenkin also talks about presenting Bait with a live score, and his plans for doing the same with Enys Men. There’s a lot of detail here about the whys and wherefores of low-budget filmmaking, including the challenges of film production during a pandemic. By a cliffside, a woman in a very shiny red rain jacket examines some unusual looking flowers with white petals and red and yellow filaments.The BFI have released several Children’s Film Foundation short features, and short shorts as well, on DVD, including so far four Bumper Box sets ( volumes 3 and 4 reviewed by me for this site). There is no plot, really, but seams of connection between fragments of time, found in a woman’s psyche and a roiling, vivid landscape.

Then there’s the amazingly creepy score, composed by Jenkin himself, along with the appearance of folk tunes, which are often just eerie enough by themselves.

The pace here is slow and dialogue is minimal – with much of it coming via her limited interactions on a battered VHF metal maritime radio. Legend has it that the stones, nineteen of them, were girls punished for dancing on a Sunday by being turned into stone. Both, though, were filmed silently on a vintage 16mm Bolex clockwork camera with sound added afterwards during the editing process. In the extras, Jenkin also acknowledges fellow Cornish resident Lawrence Gordon Clark, director of all but one of the BBC Ghost Stories for Christmas in the 1970s.

Filmed on location around the disused tin mines of West Penwith, it is also an ode to Cornwall’s rich folklore and natural beauty. There, a single volunteer ( Mary Woodvine) recording data on an unfamiliar flower finds her lonely daily observations turning troublingly towards the strange and metaphysical, forcing her to question what is real and what is nightmare. The BFI’s booklet, available with the first pressing of this release only, runs to thirty-two pages. American Becky (Amy Taylor) is in Cornwall with her father (Bob Sherman), president of a mining company in negotiations to reopen an old tin mine.The Shining is also possibly referenced as well as the subgenre of body horror – although this element is never as nightmarish as some of the grotesquery glimpsed in David Cronenberg’s more extreme productions.

No doubt commercial considerations mean that they don’t release these sets on Blu-ray but once in a while a CFF (or in this case CFTF, as the organisation had become the Children’s Film and Television Foundation by then, namely 1984) production crosses the divide and appears in HD as a Blu-ray extra.Cover Notes: A wildlife volunteer's daily observations of a rare flower take a dark turn into the strange and metaphysical, forcing both her and viewers to question what is real and what is nightmare. Also included is a booklet featuring a fine set of essays on the film, as well as a director’s statement from Jenkin. She examines the flowers and logs notes in a journal: the temperature that day and the repeated observation ‘No Change’, but soon enough there will be something to report on.