Film / News
2023’s most bizarre documentary gets a Bristol preview
Two years ago, the Found Footage Film Festival launched a Kickstarter campaign to fund one of their weirdest projects. It swiftly raised 113% of its target, with donations rolling in from as far afield as Australia, Canada, Italy and Norway.
Farmer, filmmaker and ‘outsider artist’ Charles Carson
A Life on the Farm has its origins just down the road in the Somerset village of Huish Champflower, near Wiveliscombe. Coombe End Farm was the home of farmer, filmmaker and inventor Charles Carson (1927-2008), who created a series of bizarre home movies that have been described as ‘Monty Python meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre‘. His remarkable oeuvre came to light when Bristol-born filmmaker Oscar Harding’s grandfather died in 2006. Among his possessions was a VHS of one of Carson’s unique films featuring, among many other oddities, a cat funeral, multiple cow births and skeletons riding horses and tractors. Naturally, Oscar was intrigued, and with the support of the Found Footage Film Festival set out to find out more about the life and times of this village eccentric who’s now posthumously billed as an outsider artist and pioneer of ‘death positivity’.
“What was initially going to be a short film, looking exclusively at the oddity of this video, turned into a globetrotting feature-length film that represents a years-long journey to learn about the remarkable Charles,” reveals Oscar. “The more my team and I learned about the man behind the camera, the more of a story there was to tell – neighbours and family sharing memories as wonderfully bizarre as the video itself, expert examination into his psyche; the tragedy of a frustrated creative who lost everything; and the fan club he didn’t know he had.”
is needed now More than ever
Production was interrupted by the Covid-19 pandemic, but now A Life on the Farm has been completed and is ready to be unleashed upon an unsuspecting world. It goes on general release from September 8. But before that, this pleasingly strange film is being previewed in Bristol by its natural hosts: The Bristol Bad Film Club.
Charles gets ready for his close-up
“Our film is a love letter to eccentrics and aspiring filmmakers everywhere,” says Oscar. “There’s a Charles Carson in every village in the British isles and beyond. This is their story as much as it is Charles’.”
The BBFC preview of A Life on the Farm takes place at the Bristol Improv Theatre on Thursday 7 September, and will be followed by a Q&A with director Oscar Harding. Tickets, price £6, are available here.
Images: Oscar Harding
Read more: Monty Python meets The Texas Chainsaw Massacre in Somerset
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