Hollow From Paul Holbrook Nabs RIIFF Prem

10th August 2021

The Pitch Fund winning film Hollow has been selected for the 2021 Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival, taking place from August 9th-15^th 2021. Hollow, whose World Premiere will take place at RIIFF, was chosen from over 6,700 submissions from more than 98 countries. The 39th Flickers RIIFF Festival will be a COVID-safe hybrid of in-person outdoor drive-in and online screenings.

Hollow follows a grieving mother as she considers taking revenge against the man who killed her child. Award-winning Bristol-based filmmaker Paul Holbrook shot the film in 2020 with Reel Issues Films producer Luke Walton and Jackie Sheppard of Footprint Films. Hollow is a dark, revenge thriller exploring the moral and religious intricacies surrounding the concept of revenge and redemption. Hollow is the follow-up film to Hungry Joe, also written and directed by Paul Holbrook.

The Pitch Film Fund, which is now open for 2022 submissions, was established in 2009 to discover, nurture and develop emerging filmmakers by providing opportunities to receive in-depth training, masterclasses and support, as well as financial backing to create short films inspired by the bible. Runners up receive training and development to help further their careers. Previous Pitch films include internationally praised shorts such as the Pan African Film Festival winner White Gold and Bafta Cymru-nominated Only Child. Many winning filmmakers (and finalists) have secured agents and a roadmap for their careers, while two-time finalist Francis Annan directed recent feature hit Escape From Pretoria (produced by Jackie Sheppard and Mark Blaney of Footprint Films).

“Hollow is a very personal project for me, so to have the chance to make the film through The Pitch and then be selected for an international film festival, is a chance for me to show the world that a boy who grew up in the backstreets of Bristol, can still achieve his dreams,” added Hollow director, Paul Holbrook.

Paul is an award-winning writer/director. A proud working-class Bristolian, he was born and bred in Hartcliffe – a rough, impoverished council estate in the South West of England.

Despite a lack of formal education, Paul started out as a screenwriter, writing feature-length scripts for the spec market and made encouraging progress, advancing in various industry-backed screenwriting competitions including Page, Shore, Screencraft and in 2018 made the final 1% of The Academy Nicholl Fellowship (The Oscars). He has also made the final stages of the BBC Writersroom, the later stages of iShorts and has been selected for industry-backed mentoring and career development through Creative England, Bafta and the BFI.

After years of honing his writing craft, Paul eventually moved into film-making too, driven by a passion to develop and direct his own work he has written and directed a plethora of successful short films across varying genres including comedy, drama, sci-fi and horror. His work fuses real-world authenticity, British social realism and genre flair and his films have screened and won numerous awards at Bafta, BIFA and Oscar-qualifiers festivals around the world including Palm Springs, BFI London, Encounters and Aesthetica.

Paul is a returning member of the BaftaXBFICrew programme, has been funded by BFI Network and Enter The Pitch and is in early development with BFI on his first feature, based on the award-winning short Hungry Joe. He is shopping around his autobiographical coming-of-age feature Snog and is in active development on an exciting TV comedy called Ordinary Joe. He alsohas a plethora of smaller projects aiming to shoot through 2021.

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