New Sussex film captures lockdown life in a box

Mayfield film-maker Helmie Stil has captured lockdown in Box, a short film featuring her family.
Helmie StilHelmie Stil
Helmie Stil

It shows one family living their normal lives, in a five-sided box during lockdown.

Director Helmie explains: “In a way we always live this way, within our own minds, but during this epidemic our walls closed in.

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“We adjust so quickly. Scary, perhaps, but also beautiful: we adapt, we change, we find a new normal.

“What boxes us in? The opinions of others? Of experts? Of friends? Or is it the media? Or the systems – of healthcare, of a nation – that box us? Or do we do the boxing ourselves, to cope, to get by?

“This lockdown has made us aware of our external constraints: what we can and can’t do and how this changes the normal course of our lives.

“With this film I hope to show the viewer a more personal view of daily life – the view from inside the box – in which some things will never change even as the world outside is turned upside down.

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“During the lockdown I realised that we are all living in our own box. With our own thoughts, our own opinions, our own worlds.

“I was supposed to produce and direct an underwater film poem where a swimmer would swim into a transparent box, but because of the lockdown I had to postpone that film shoot.

“So my family and I were looking at these transparent boxes in our house all the time and I realised that the box symbolises this lockdown for me, and because during this epidemic our walls closed in I decided to film our daily routines and us.

“The first time in the box it gives you a bit of a fearfully strange feeling. You literally feel closed up.

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“The sound fades away, you hear yourself breathing and in the beginning it feels a bit claustrophobic, but the strange thing was that we all got used to it really quickly, like the lockdown itself.

“In the beginning we were scared and insecure and slowly you get used to it. The children even loved playing in the box and when the camera wasn’t recording they had fun with it.

“I thought about the structure of the film and because we all have to start and end a day I focussed on that structure.

“So the film starts when the children wake up and ends with bath time and going to bed.

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“It’s a one-day experience even though we filmed it over a couple of days.

“I filmed and edited the film and because we had such a structure it was nice to see the puzzle pieces of the film fall into each other during the edit.

“The most difficult bit was that we are all so involved and we know and love each other so much, it is difficult to see it from a distance, so at one point I didn’t know if the film was any good.

“My partner Lennert Busch made the music and sound for the film. He wanted to capture an intimate internal dialogue so he used his own voice to create the music.

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“I hope the film is an experience for people and will make them think about their own box.

“This film is more than a film about lockdown.

“It’s about the way we all have a box around us and we keep the box safe by filling it up with ideas that we know, but it would be great if we fill the boxes with different ideas/opinions and let those opinions make cracks in our box so we are able to expand our boxes by opening up.

“We should question our own opinions and look at what boxes us in and why?

“This film is part of King’s College, London’s Healthy Scepticism project, which hopes to offer vivid new perspectives on our pandemic moment while also exploring the longer, larger arguments about the nature of evidence and expertise when it comes to our health.”

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