Four Lions

Awards – Sundance Film Festival – Award for Dramatic World Cinema – relying on critical acclaim

Locations

Almería, Andalucía, Spain(Pakistan scenes), Doncaster, South Yorkshire, England, UK (Robin Hood Airport), High Wycombe, Buckinghamshire, England, UK and Sheffield, South Yorkshire, England, UK – familiar settings for local audiences

Summary

Four Lions tells the story of a group of British jihadists who push their abstract dreams of glory to the breaking point. As the wheels fly off, and their competing ideologies clash, what emerges is an emotionally engaging (and entirely plausible) farce. In a storm of razor-sharp verbal jousting and large-scale set pieces, Four Lions is a comic tour de force; it shows that-while terrorism is about ideology-it can also be about idiots.

Plot Summary

The film follows a group of young Muslim men living in Sheffield who have become radicalised and decide to become suicide bombers. Two members of the group, Omar (Riz Ahmed) and Waj (Kayvan Novak), go to a terrorist training camp in Pakistan. The other two are Barry (Nigel Lindsay), who is a convert to Islam, and Faisal (Adeel Akhtar), who tries to train crows to be bombers.A fifth member, Hassan (Arsher Ali), is recruited by Barry while Omar and Waj are in Pakistan.Faisal accidentally kills himself moving explosives. The film culminates in the remaining four trying to blow themselves up at the London Marathon. Hassan loses his nerve and decided to give himself up to the Police, but Barry detonates his bomb using a phone, killing him and alerting the authorities to the remaining three. The three split up and after a fiery confrontation with Barry, Omar realises he has led his naive and unintelligent friend, Waj, into something he does not want to do, and sets off to make him change his mind. Omar eventually contacts Waj via his mobile phone, but is attacked by Barry, who swallows his SIM card. However, Barry begins to choke on the SIM card, causing a passer-by to detonate his bomb whilst carrying out the Heimlich maneuver. Meanwhile, Waj is cornered by Police and takes a kebab shop hostage. Omar manages to retrieve a phone and attempts to talk Waj down. However, his call is interrupted by a Police raid in which they shoot a hostage after mistaking him for the bomber. With Omar's call lost, Waj detonates his bomb as Omar rushes into the street. Distraught, Omar walks into a nearby chemist's and detonates his own bomb, a target the group had suggested before Omar settled on the Marathon.

“While the terrorists’ conversations are spot-on and the tension builds throughout, Four Lions looks more like a made-for-television special than a cinema spectacular. That could also be blamed on the grey skies of Britain and budgetary constraints — I expect potential backers shied away from the term “bomb-com”

Director

Christopher Morris is an English satirist, writer, director and actor. A former radio DJ, he is best known for anchoring the spoof news and current affairs television programmes The Day Today and Brass Eye (both productions aired on Channel4, made be TalkBack productions who have other associations with Film4), as well as his frequent engagement with controversial subject matter such as substance abuse and paedophilia.

In 2010 Morris directed his first feature-length film Four Lions about a group of inept British terrorists. Reception of the film was largely positive and received a respectable box office.[4] Outside his central work, Morris tends to stay out of the public eye and has become one of the more enigmatic figures in British comedy.

Production

Morris spent three years researching the project, speaking to terrorism experts, police, the secret service, and imams, as well as ordinary Muslims, and writing the script in 2007. In a separate interview, he asserts that the research predated the 7 July 2005 London Bombings

"It was an attempt to figure it out, to ask, 'What's going on with this?' This [the "War on Terror"] is something that's commanding so much of our lives, shaping so much of our culture, turning this massive political wheel. I was wondering what this new game was all about. But then 7/7 hit that with a fairly large impact, in that we were suddenly seeing all these guys with a Hovis accent. Suddenly you're not dealing with an amorphous Arab world so much as with British people who have been here quite a long time and who make curry and are a part of the landscape. So you've got a double excavation going on."

The project was originally rejected by both the BBC and Channel 4 as being too controversial. Morris suggested in a mass email, titled "Funding Mentalism", that fans could contribute between £25 and £100 each to the production costs of the film and would appear as extras in return Funding was secured in October 2008 from Film 4 Productions and Warp Films, with Mark Herbert producing. Filming began in Sheffield in May 2009.

Morris has described the film as a "farce", which exposes the "Dad's Army side to terrorism". During the making of the film, the director sent the script to former Guantánamo Bay detainee Moazzam Begg. Begg has said that he found nothing in the script that would be offensive to British Muslims. The actor Riz Ahmed also contacted Begg, to ask whether the subject matter was "too raw". When the film was completed, Begg was given a special screening and said that he enjoyed it.

Warp Films
Warp Films, a sister company of Warp Records, was set up in 1999 with funding from NESTA (The National Endowment for Science Technology and the Arts (NESTA) The company acts through a combination of practical programmes, early stage investment, research and policy, and the formation of partnerships to foster innovation and deliver radical new ideas.)

At present there have been five releases on Warp Films: My Wrongs #8245–8249 & 177 by Chris Morris, which won the Best Short Film award at the BAFTA Awards, Paul King's Bunny and the Bull,and Shane Meadows's films Dead Man's Shoes, This Is England and "Le Donk & Scor-zay-zee". They are also responsible for making This is England ’86.

Optimum Releasing

Mise-En-Scene

Familiar setting – Sheffield –Northern Working –class

Distinctive British feel – Realism (a strong feature of British films)

Budget appearance in both costume and editing.

Critical success

81% on Rotten Tomatoes

Positive reviews from BRITISH CRITICS

Generally negative reviews from US Critics – why? (theme etc)

Box Office Success

Despite an initial release on just 115 screens across the UK, the film saw impressive numbers at the Box Office on its opening weekend, generating the highest site average of all the new releases (£5,292) and making a total of £609,000. According to the Official Top 10 UK Film Chart (7–9 May 2010), Four Lions was placed at sixth behind Iron Man 2, Furry Vengeance A Nightmare on Elm Street, Hot Tub Time Machine and The Back-Up Plan. Due to its popularity, Optimum Releasing increased the number of screens showing the film to 200.

As of 6 August 2010, Four Lions has grossed £2,928,884 at the UK box office.

£0.3m in US box office – it was not a commercial success in America, although was not intended to be.