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get of between £1.8m and £2m for a shoot of seven and a half weeks. The Darkest Light is set in the Yorkshire Dales in 1998 during an outbreak of foot and mouth disease. While playing truant, two 11- year-old girls claim to have seen something strange on the moors, a flash of light or a mysteri- ous voice, perhaps.
The Catholic Catherine is convinced that the vision has appeared to cure her brother of leukaemia. Her friend, Uma, a Hindu, is not so sure. Rumour spreads through the community as contagious as disease. While the pyres of dead ani- mals burn in the valley, the girls acquire the status of visionaries.
Catherine’s father, a struggling dairy farmer played by Stephen Dillane (Welcome To Sarajevo), is sceptical. Kerry Fox (Shallow Grave) plays the
mother, Sue. She is the devout Catholic of the fam- ily and while all too aware that children are full of fan- tasy, desperately wants to believe her daughter’s ver- sion of events. But as her son’s condition worsens,
Catherine’s epiphany seems increasingly unlikely - until a second vision occurs.
Most of the film was shot near Ingleton in the Yorkshire Dales National Park and over the border into Cumbria. “We wanted a different landscape from the one that has become familiar from things like the James Herriott series,” says Blaney.
Wherever they would have gone this past summer, they would have surely been hampered by appalling weather conditions. “I have to take my hat off to everyone involved that despite being knocked back, we came in on schedule. It was tough and we got days behind at certain points but we managed to make it up in the end,” he commented.
“One of the pressures was the hours you can work the children. They are allowed six and a
half hours a day on set, but you can only work them - either rehearsing or filming - for three hours. So it was a very restrictive regime and we had to fit in some tutoring when the shoot ran into school term time.”
None of the three children had any previous experience of filming. “We wanted to find children with natural talent rather than ones who could audition for a performance. We wanted them to talk and improvise around lines, so we didn’t go the theatre school route but went round youth groups and schools.
“Keri Arnold, who plays Catherine, was seen in a youth club in Barnsley, while Jason Walton (the ail- ing brother) belonged to a drama club in Bradford. Very late in the day we found Kavita Sungha to play Uma. She from Southall in West London, so going up to the North was quite an experience for her. It was for the other two as well, but at least for them it was still Yorkshire.” ■ IAN SOUTAR
The Darkest Light is being originated on Fujicolor Motion Picture Negative
Photos: above left; DP Mary Farbrother and co-directors Simon Beaufoy and Bille Eltringham; above right: Mary Farbrother on the set of The Darkest Light.