"Mother´s Day" – filming drama with AMIRA

Johann Perry has spent most of his twenty-year career making documentaries, but he successfully ventured into feature territory with "Against The Law," which was nominated for a British Film Academy Award (BAFTA) last year. He’s an AMIRA enthusiast, having bought one soon after they first came out. “I just want a good camera with a great sensor, a well-made matte box and a beautiful lens,” he says, “and ARRI always delivers that simplicity, which I find very reassuring.”

“I would feel lost as a DP if I wasn’t touching the camera. I like to strip everything down to bare essentials – I like my camera set-up to be sparse and clean. I don’t like ‘gubbins’,” he adds, using a very British colloquialism meaning paraphernalia.  

“For my whole career I’ve been shooting in the real world, with real light, in small spaces – documentary filming makes you make the best of things. The AMIRA allowed me to do that, and when I moved into features it allowed me to carry on doing what I do normally – but in a more controlled environment.”

"Mother´s Day" tells the story of the IRA’s bomb attack on Warrington in 1993, in which two boys were killed. It was a pivotal moment in “The Troubles” that claimed the lives of more than three thousand people in Britain and Ireland over a thirty-year period. The deaths of the two boys – Johnathan Ball and Tim Parry - caused a wave of revulsion that lead to a new dialogue, culminating five years later in the Good Friday Agreement that brought peace to Northern Ireland. 

Johann went to great lengths to capture the authentic feel of the north of England and Ireland a quarter of a century ago for "Mother´s Day."  “I asked myself ‘what do the 1990s look like?’”, he says. “The fifties, the sixties, the seventies have a ‘look’ – but the nineties? I spent a long time looking at archive film from the nineties, from Belfast and Dublin and Warrington. I wanted to project the time and I didn’t want to apply any gloss to it, in fact I wanted to strip out any glossiness and get down to the real. I designed my own LUTs to match that – to create a dirty, dingy look.”

“I chose 25 pantone colors, taken from archive of clothes, cars, interiors… there were tans and yellows and blues and burgundies. I made an A3 ‘Mood Board’ and fed it into set design, costume, make-up. That enabled us to stay within the color palette of the time.” 

The film opens with the lead-up to the bombing, and the explosions that caused panic and death on that day in Warrington. It is beautifully handled, combining the brutality of the event with a profound respect for the victims. It also manages to convey the abrupt sudden savagery of explosions and the way in which time can seem to expand in the short, fragmented moments that follow a blast, when lives are snuffed-out, or forever changed.