Essex Man (Prepares For Death)

A Poem film by Peter Urpeth

June 2025

Synopsis:

A film poem. A journey of re-memory to the evocative places of my childhood.
At first, a return after fifty years to explore traces of memory, and to bring them to consciousness; to recover a sense of safety, and to chart the routes once walked that linked those safe spaces.
But then a journey to the edges of that safety, to crossing points that once represented movement into spaces of trauma.
The poet is already in the recovered world, and has gathered the memories. The evocative objects are now restored, and he finds a way to secure them for all eternity in hidden spaces in places central to their power.

Film Programmers:

The film is listed on Filmfreeway here

Screenings:

Ó Bhéal Poetry Film Competition / Festival, Cork, Ireland

I am beyond honoured to announce that Essex Man will be showing at the prestigious Ó Bhéal Poetry Film Competition / Festival, Cork, Ireland in November. Full details here

Living With Buildings Festival 2025 - Coventry, England!

Delighted to announce that the film has been selected for ‘Living With Buildings’ winter festival. WTS for further details.

LWB Festival is an amazing programme - ‘The films shown at Living With Buildings touch on forces of a street, ruin lust, roads to nowhere and tensions between the decline of social housing and provision set against rising gentrification.’

Festival website: Here

Poetry in Motion Film Festival 2025, Colorado Springs, USA!

Delighted that my short film, 'Essex Man (Prepares For Death)', (details in filmmaker tab in top menu) has been selected for the Poetry in Motion 2025 film festival in Colorado Springs, showing 12 November 2025 at The Cottonwood Center for the Arts, and is among the nominees for the Poetry in Motion Best Poetry Film 2025.

Festival website: Here

Director’s Statement:

This film is the first manifestation of my project 'Beating The Bounds', which aims to enable people to overcome childhood trauma through a return to and mapping of the evocative safe spaces of their childhoods.
This is a multi-media project that aims to revive and reconstitute the ancient British custom of physically marking the limits of local territories by walking their boundary lines.
Beating the Bounds requires us to walk the old routes of our childhoods, linking these places, spaces, and objects, and to map those routes as secure personal territories.
These places, often no longer visited by us, are so evocative in our memories and imaginations. We can reclaim, renew and return them to the present day in a positive form, and strengthen our sense of security and safety.
The film is also about the power of being present with a camera, and the openness to chance encounters, which happened with immense power during the making of this film, supporting my sense of value in the project undertaken.
I want the poem, a kind of production subsequent to the journey, to lay the like conscious mind over the unconscious mind, perhaps as represented by the film and its immediacy, its present-tenseness.
The music in this film features my band, Makeshift. The process of its production was through my treatment of, and final reassemblage of, individual solo tracks provided to me by my band members.

Special mention also for my brothers in music, Makeshift - Stuart Wildng (percussion), Geoff Collins (saxes, digital wind instruments) and Nick Smith (percussion/ electronics), with whom I put together the soundtrack for the film, which I am very proud of and which is a fundamental part of a poetry film.

For full details of the ‘Beating The Bounds’ Project see my blog here

For this project, I was very fortunate to secure an artist’s bursary from An Lanntair for the initial work. With that, I travelled back to the places in which I lived when young, at key moments, and walked between these homes, and homes from home, and this film grew from that journeying.