Somers Town 2008

Director Shane Meadows sketches with a gentle hand the unlikely friendship between two teenage boys adrift in London. Tomo has fled a grim life in Nottingham. Marek is the son of a hard-working, hard-partying Polish construction worker. "Shane Meadows takes his first onscreen trip to London in his endearingly funny, deceptively minimal working-class dramedy. Having introduced audiences to the easy, rabble-rousing naturalism of little Thomas Turgoose in last year's This Is England, Meadows again casts the now teenaged towhead - strangely comfortable in these awkward adolescent years - to shoulder the story's weight... Written by Meadows' frequent collaborator Paul Fraser and shot almost entirely in black-and-white DV so crisp that its wistfulness feels more modern than nostalgic, Somers Town is, in its meager ambitions, warm and spacious and just about perfect. I had a perma-grin from beginning to end." — Aaron Hills, Premiere