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part of
double bill #5
I Am Good At Karate
Int’l Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen
2022
Festival du nouveau cinéma
2022
Portrait of a young teenager with mental health issues who is passionate about karate. They wander around a housing estate in East Kent, locked in verbal and physical battles with a hallucinatory demon made of football shirts.
Bio Jess Dadds
In his work, Jess Dadds (United Kingdom, 1993) often focuses on youth culture and social issues. His short film I Am Good At Karate was shot on location on a mixture of colour and hand-processed black-and-white 16mm, and also with a mixture of first-time performers and traditionally trained actors. This way, he breaks with the British tradition of social issue films presented in a predefined social realism style.
Jess Dadds’ I Am Good At Karate breaks away from the British traditional social realism film style and carves out a new experimental path, using non-linear storytelling and expressionistic brushstrokes. The film’s protagonist is a lonesome kid, weighted down by their own paralysing self-deprecation and inability to blend in with their peers. Themes of mental health issues, disadvantaged economic background, and urban alienation are seamlessly weaved through this bleak coming-of-age story energised by syncopated rhythm and a warm, saturated colour palette. Filmed in 16mm with occasional inserts of hand-processed black and white 16mm film, I Am Good At Karate illustrates a young kid’s internal journey to self-acceptance amidst institutional failure.
While the film is something of a paean to the power of an individual to fight back against the often crippling issues caused by depression and mental illness–the ending scenes in which the demon gets what for are literally and figuratively ‘punch in the air’ moments–it is also a reminder of the circumstances in which these conditions bloom. The Kid begins the film by mentioning how their brother, his best friend, and their grandmother all suffer from depression and take pills. There’s a sense of a cycle of depression, a never-ending cavalcade of suffering and pills that will pass from one generation to the next. When the Kid mentions their depression, they put their pills down the drain—and also, in a cheeky and insouciant shot, spits some remains directly down onto the camera. There’s a sense that the Kid has the chance to break a cycle, to move beyond old ways of being told how to live.
Credits
Script
Cast
Alex Wilkins, Harley Archer, Jake Dadds, Jason Williamson, Jiggy Bhore, Nathan Filer, Robert Sanders
Camera
Jamie Harding
Editor
Ben Matthews
Sound
Chase Coley
Music
Joe Deamer
Producer
Nina Somers, Thomas Wightman