At Sunny Side of the Doc 2024, Business Doc Europe caught up with Frankie Fenton, director of the feature-length project How to Stop a War. Fenton’s latest effort will be pitched in the History strand of the French industry event on June 27. During our chat, Fenton touched on the project’s inception, its visual look and style and the timely themes it tackles.
The premise of How to Stop a War unfolds in February 2003, just one month before the invasion of Iraq. As millions in Washington, London and around the world march in protest – the drum beats grow ever louder. Diplomacy takes a back seat, the military build-up in Kuwait reaches 100,000 troops and it seems that nothing will stop the war.
But as Operation Iraqi Freedom gathers pace, Operation Human Shield has just begun. A group of uncompromising idealists board three double-decker buses and head 3,277 gruelling miles, straight into a warzone. As they travel from London to Baghdad, they hope to attract a convoy of thousands to follow them and stand as human shields at the hospitals, orphanages and schools of Iraq. They believe that the US and her allies won’t dare to bomb their own citizens. But, above all, they believe they can stop a war.
The doc features “hundreds of hours of riveting never-before-seen archive footage captured by broadcast crews embedded on the bus and by the activists on the rocky road to Baghdad and beyond” accompanied by “new interviews with the key characters tracked down after two decades.”
“We want the audience to feel like they’re on the road themselves with no idea what’s coming next. The narrative unfolds in the present tense with key moments highlighted by rolling contemporary news footage from around the world. We have exclusive access to hundreds of hours of archive footage and agreements from the key activists and journalists to be interviewed,” Fenton tells BDE.
“We hear new audio interviews with the characters on the buses but they will be revealed as they are today at strategic moments to maintain the immersive feel and keep the audience guessing as to what happened to them.”
“We also have access to the very same red double decker buses which carried the shields across Europe in 2003. We plan to re-shoot the buses out on the open road in reconstructions to create a ‘road movie’ cinematic experience. These new shots will seamlessly integrate with the personal footage – conveying the drama, urgency and stunning incongruity of these iconic London buses driving on motorways, over mountains, through forests and across deserts,” he further explains.
Zooming in on sound, we also discover that the score will be “inspired by pop and rock music from the noughties [2000s], interwoven with music from the regions they travel through and additional atmospheric sound design,” thus “bridging the three-week trip to Baghdad with the inevitable climax of war and destruction.”
How to Stop a War is being produced by Ireland’s Kennedy Films with Figs Jackman and Ed Dallal for the UK outfit Spring Films.
Led by Kathryn Kennedy and Fenton himself, Kennedy Films fiction and doc features have played at A-List festivals such as Sundance and TIFF, and have been distributed in theatres across the US, UK and Ireland and through online streaming platforms like Netflix, Apple TV+, Amazon Prime and Paramount. Some of their previous docs include It’s Not Yet Dark (Sundance, 2017) narrated by Colin Farrell, and Atomic Hope: Inside the Pro-Nuclear Movement (Hot Docs, 2022).
Meanwhile, Spring Films is specialised in “high-end blue-chip documentary and non-scripted content for clients such as Netflix, Discovery +, Apple TV+, A+E, BBC, Channel 4, HBO and Nat Geo,” among others. Company highlights include Joshua Oppenheimer’s Oscar nominated The Look of Silence, André Singer’s Emmy winning Night Will Fall and Werner Herzog’s Into The Inferno.
“We’re here to meet financiers, broadcasters and like-minded partners who share in our love for adventurous storytelling. During these politically uncertain times this story shows us that ordinary people with courage and conviction can deliver the most inspirational of messages and really change the world for the better,” Fenton sums up.
