Hi, I’m Erin and I’m the Producer and Director of Fascination Street, our final year project at Sheffield Hallam University. We would love to collaborate with you on this project.

Synopsis

In a gritty and unusual retelling of the classic fairytale: two childhood friends, Ansel and Greta, head on a night out in the dark and dirty entertainment sector of their temporally ambiguous city – Fascination Street.

Ansel seeks excitement outside of the job that he hates, and Greta offers to take him to her usual nightclub, but when they go separate ways, they’re dropped into their own strange nightmares.

Director’s Note

What is home?

Is it the safety within the sense of self when all needs are met?

For those without that, the romanticised Gingerbread House that offers to fulfil all gluttonous wants – until the Id-driven short-term gratification eats you alive.

If all you do is work, where comes the joy that makes that life worth living?

If all you do is party, where is the evidence of self?

Fascination Street is a film about losing yourself in misguided hedonism, losing contact with any real identity beyond drink, drugs, and neon lights. It’s about rehashing all the bad things that caused your banging hangover, when you swear for a couple of days that you’ll never drink again.

Inspired by the anarchic raunch of Gregg Arakki’s Teenage Apocalypse Trilogy and other works, the DIY subcultural satire of The Mighty Boosh, and the fantastic theatricality of Tim Burton’s Hansel and Gretel, and The Cabinet of Dr Caligari, Fascination Street captures the colour in the darker areas of the pleasure principle.

If you don’t have the balance, do you have any real self? If you don’t have any real self, are you even alive? When you’re vulnerable, alone, inebriated, what unusual creatures might be drawn to you?

One of my previous films has similar themes of identity, circularity, and elements of horror:

https://youtu.be/XVc0oQbsmNE?si=RFywyd5IGgUOBzCm

I was invited to show it at 2 film festivals!

Where does your money go?

We’re lucky enough to have actors on a voluntary basis, and a strong community to access locations, but nothing comes free.

Costumes, props and travel will likely carry the biggest costs. Following that, submissions to film festivals rack up quickly, but are necessary for the distribution of the film.

Donations will go toward all production costs, notably the ones above.