About

Late September (87 mins) takes place over a 24-hour period, in a beautiful Kent house and garden, and follows the course and aftermath of a birthday celebration organised by a middle-aged woman for her husband to whom she has been married for nearly 40 years. As the day and night progress, old rifts, new relationships and secrets emerge amongst friends, and the underlying tensions in the marriage can no longer be contained.

This age group, the post war generation now approaching old age, has not received so much attention in film and the problems these friends face are specific but universal and recognisable to us all; their lives, their hopes and fears for the future are portrayed with a total lack of sentimentality but also with great warmth, humour and empathy.

This film is the second project made by a core group of experienced actors and technicians who came together to make Low Tide (2007). The group has since expanded but once again, the film has been made cheaply and shot in a very short period, using long fluid takes, natural light where possible and improvised dialogue. To work this quickly one has to be very prepared. Our structure is well thought out beforehand but within that the actors, in character, determine the emotional and dramatic content of each scene as it happens. All of us have found this way of filmmaking, "without permission", to be challenging and liberating. In these difficult, locked-down times, I believe we have found one possible way (among hopefully many others!) for new work to emerge and for cinematic form to develop.

Director's C.V.

Jon Sanders was born in Kent. After Cambridge University he studied film at the Slade School of Art under Thorold Dickinson. He has had a long and distinguished career in the film industry, working as an editor, sound recordist (From Mao to Mozart, Oscar winning film about Isaac Stern’s tour of China), documentary maker (Then When the World Changed, co-directed with cameraman, Roger Deakins) and writer/director. His collaboration with the artist Lucia Noguiera Smoke (7 mins) 1996 is now part of the Tate Collection. His first feature film, Painted Angels (106 mins), starring Kelly McGillis and Brenda Fricker, which was about prostitution in the Wild West, premiered at the Rotterdam Film Festival and was released in the UK in 2000 by Artificial Eye. His second feature film Low Tide (86 mins) premiered at Curzon Soho in January 2008.

Low Tide:

“A small film about life and death that hits home more than most self-important big ones.“
**** (Derek Malcolm)
“Low Tide is a micro-budget drama about the last days of a terminally ill middle-aged woman. Distinguished by an elegant, very English sense of formal restraint but raging with raw, heartfelt emotion, the film is remarkably moving, sometimes unbearably so. It's well worth seeing.”
(Time Out)
“Low Tide offers a radical template for a revived British auteur cinema.”
(Vertigo Magazine)
“One of the best, if not the best, no budget films I have ever seen”.
(Jim Stark)

Painted Angels:

“A startlingly new view of the old west...boldly original and beautifully acted.”
(Derek Malcolm, The Guardian)
“Achingly moving” (Phillip French, The Observer)
“A graceful drama that does full justice to its subjects” (Empire)