This July Soneva Jani is honoured to be hosting the world’s first screenings of Elliott Hasler’s To Hunt a Tiger and Nootau. Elliott is the United Kingdom’s youngest feature film director. There will also be a showing of his first feature film, finished when he was just 16, Charlie’s Letters. For guests who are interested in directing, Elliott will also host a mobile video shooting workshop.
His first feature film
The young director wrapped up Charlie’s Letters, which portrays a true World War II story from Brighton at the age of 16, after three years of production. Charlie’s Letters premiered in his hometown of Brighton, selling out six of the seven showings in May 2017 as part of the Brighton Fringe Festival. It also screened at the Edinburgh Festival and was shown on the Brighton Big Screen alongside T2 Trainspotting and La La Land, where it received critical acclaim and was lauded by critics as a “miracle” with Culture Trip’s Graham Fuller citing Hasler as “the next Spielberg”.
To Hunt a Tiger and other productions
Elliott recently completed To Hunt a Tiger, a short film set in the British Raj starring John Locke (Darkest Hour, The Favourite) and Charlotte Peters (Pound of Flesh, Interlude in Prague). The film tells a tale of love, loss and adventure against the backdrop of early 20th Century India. It centres on a troubled English hunter who travels to West Bengal with the intention of hunting an elusive and magnificent tiger. To Hunt a Tiger was shot in Sri Lanka, following in the footsteps of David Lean’s The Bridge on the River Kwai, it also features an original score by the Emmy Award Winning composer, Daniel Clive McCallum.
Elliott heads up Relsah Productions, an independent production company based in Brighton, which offers both feature films and documentaries for cinema and television. Along with Charlie’s Letters, Elliott also made a documentary covering the exploits of Brighton’s Mayor, The Mayor Diaries, which premiered on TV in February 2018 and a selection of short films.
His next project, Vindication Swim, is a feature film based on the true story of a swimmer, set in the 1920s. In the shadow of World War I, swimmer Mercedes Gleitze fights to overcome Britain’s patriarchal society, along with her troubled coach, to become the first English woman to swim the Channel. However, after a rival comes forward claiming to have already accomplished the feat, Gleitze is forced to battle against the Channel Swimming Association in order to retain her record and her legacy.
Elliott will be at Soneva Jani from July 1 to 7, 2019.