It’s an irony, but what critics are calling one of the most perceptive films about British life in the wake of Brexit was actually made by a…German. Jens Meurer’s Seaside Special has been warmly received at festivals in the UK while also turning into a surprise hit in Germany.
“Since I am German, I had just this feeling in me, the sense that it would be a good idea to go to a place like Cromer in north Norfolk with its end-of-the-pier show,” veteran producer-director Meurer explains what took him to a seaside town in the summer of 2019, a period when the social and political divisions caused by the UK’s decision to leave the EU were still glaring.
“Obviously, the world did not need me to make another film about the economic disadvantages of Brexit,” says Meurer, who is the boss, alongside Judy Tossell, of prolific Berlin-based production outfit Egoli Tossell.
Meurer had been at university in Oxford for three years with two of the pantomime villains behind the Brexit debacle, the Tory politicians Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. He felt they had contaminated the great British brand. The filmmaker therefore headed to Cromer, a place he saw as representing the “best of British,” to see what life was like there.
“I had been to Cromer [for the first time] almost 10 years before and had seen the [end-of-the-pier] show,” Meurer recalls how he first went to the Norfolk town at the invitation of his in-laws who were on holiday there.
“I wanted to be a good son-in-law. I put on a brave face. I thought, what is this going to be,” Meurer remembers his trepidation about the original trip. But he loved it – and he was immediately enraptured by the end-of-the-pier show. “It was literally 10 minutes in and I felt this is unique; it’s wonderful. It’s a professional show but it’s also on a human scale. It’s analogue. It’s people for people. No-one thinks they are going to become world famous on television. They’re there because they are entertaining and making people happy twice a day. They have two shows a day in the summer.”
Meurer believes that Cromer is a “microcosm of Britain, a very British place.” He was there with his camera at a time after the Brexit referendum when the country was being “torn this way and that way.” Two thirds of Cromer voters were in favour of the UK leaving the EU, but Brexit has turned out to have a sting in the tail for most of them.
Across the English Channel, in mainland Europe, huge interest remains in what is happening in the UK. Meurer believes that his film appeals to German audiences because it didn’t feature politicians, journalists and economists talking down at them. Instead, it shows a very British community, with all its warmth, eccentricities and contradictions.
Berlin-based Farbfilm, established 2005 by Alexandre Dupont Geisselmann and Reno Koppe, released it to packed audiences in January under the title Seaside Special – A Love Letter to the British. “Imagine Ken Loach, Monty Python and Martin Parr making a documentary together!” the distributor cleverly summed up the film’s attractions for its audiences.
“Continentals love the British. We want the Brits, we need the Brits,” Meurer says of the surprising levels of affection that still exist toward the UK across the EU. His film is not about the politics surrounding Brexit but about “the strong connection that remains.” The director therefore wasn’t surprised that German viewers flocked to watch the documentary.
What has startled Meurer, though, is the level of interest in the film from the British themselves. He shot the film on 16mm. It’s intended to be seen in cinemas, in a collective atmosphere. It has been touring around the UK, screening in local independent theatres in various coastal towns among them Wells-Next-The-Sea, Aldeburgh, Leiston, Woodbridge and Cromer – and is now being shown in cities like London and Birmingham,
“That was a surprise, how strongly people reacted and how much conversation there is afterwards,” the director says of how intrigued British viewers have been by his portrait of a little seaside town in England buffeted by the winds of Brexit.
Meurer has been distributing the documentary himself. “This has been completely grassroots,” he says of the release strategy. The film’s UK life started at the Cambridge Film Festival where even the festival programmers were startled by the emotional response the film elicited. It ended up winning the audience award there. Through contacts he made at Cambridge, Meurer secured invitations to screen the film at other venues across the country. “I just took the film and always some of the protagonists from the film and travelled to these places. I was in Norwich and there someone said go to Leiston [a small town in Suffolk]…that is really what has happened so far,” he notes of how one screening invariably leads to another.
Leading indie venues including the Regent Street Cinema in London and various Soho House sites have been showing the doc. Some have programmed it multiple times. A cinema in Woodbridge, for example, has plans to screen it throughout the summer. “It’s a film that seems to fit into the times well,” Meurer says. He is now in talks with mainstream distributors about possibly giving it a wider, more conventional release.
And, yes, the documentary has been exhibited regularly in Cromer, in the theatre where much of the film is set, to an audience including many of its subjects. “They even built a special cinema screen, a really big one, for the theatre,” Meurer says. He hopes that showing Seaside Special will become an annual tradition.
Now, having directed his two passion pictures, Seaside Special and an earlier documentary An Impossible Project (about intrepid Viennese biologist Florian ‘Doc’ Kaps who risks his career and fortune to save the world’s last Polaroid factory), Meurer is getting back to his day job as a producer. He will be in Cannes this month with various new films including One Night Only, an Irish-set Cinemas Paradiso-style drama, and Alice Troughton’s The Lesson, starring Richard E Grant and Julie Delpy. He can only hope that these films will provoke the same emotional response as Seaside Special and leave “as many happy faces” after their screenings.
