At the 29th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival (PÖFF), British writer-director Richard Hawkins delivered a cinema event that defies easy categorisation. Think of England, his long-awaited second feature, is a daring, provocative exploration of wartime propaganda, moral ambiguity, and the art of cinema itself – all wrapped in a darkly comedic package that refuses to let audiences off easily. The film’s world premiere in the festival’s main competition immediately signalled something rare: a work of true artistic ambition, willingly taking risks that most contemporary filmmakers would shy away from.

The premise alone announces Hawkins’ audacious intent. Set in the run-up to the Allied invasion of France during World War II, the film imagines a secret government mission: a group of six disparate individuals is dispatched to a remote Orkney island with a classified objective – to create propaganda pornographic films intended to boost the fighting morale of troops headed to Normandy. What could easily become a farce instead becomes something far more complex: a meditation on desire, power, morality, and the desperate measures humans will take when faced with existential stakes.

In anticipation of the Allied invasion of France, two British film projects are commissioned at the very highest level. On one, Churchill himself insists that Laurence Olivier immediately embark upon a lavish production of Shakespeare’s Henry V, securing him a state-of-the-art, 3-strip Technicolour camera and all of the available film stock . . .

This is the story of the other.

An Itch That Needed Scratching

For Hawkins, this project represents a nearly two-decade creative journey. He originally attempted to write the story years ago, only to find it didn’t work. The script stalled, shelved, deemed not ready for the world. Then, after COVID-19 reshaped our collective understanding of society and morality, something shifted. “I couldn’t make it work the way I felt was right,” Hawkins explained in his remarks at the festival. “It just didn’t feel relevant to today’s times, but now it does.”

The director’s motivation was deeply philosophical. “I wanted to explore the fine lines that we draw in the sand to define our moral compass. What is right and what is wrong, how those lines get very quickly washed away and rewritten, notably during war.” In an era marked by culture wars, debates over acceptable speech, and the erosion of clear moral boundaries, Hawkins found his story suddenly, urgently timely. The 1930s and 1940s, he reasoned, offered the perfect historical mirror – a moment when societies explicitly grappled with how to police behaviour while simultaneously demanding unspeakable acts of violence from their citizens.

This paradox sits at the film’s thematic heart. While the government demands the creation of erotic content to motivate soldiers, it simultaneously enforces rigid codes about what is permissible. Hawkins’ script interrogates cinema’s own relationship with these boundaries. Film, he noted, has spent over a century pushing against initial censorship codes – showing more skin, more violence, more transgression – yet two lines remain largely untouched: actual sex and actual killing. “You cannot act having sex,” he stated plainly. “You actually have to do it. Likewise, you cannot kill someone.” This ontological reality became central to his understanding of how the film should function.

A Cast of the Internally Broken

Hawkins assembled an ensemble cast that transforms potential caricature into complex humanity. Jack Bandeira, as the traumatised Corporal Evans, delivers a performance of devastating interiority. Evans is a soldier shattered by war, living in a fractured reality, suffering from what would now be diagnosed as severe PTSD and possibly schizophrenia. Bandeira approached the role with remarkable depth, finding the victim beneath the veneer of a dangerous man.

“The weird thing with Evans is that he’s never living in any reality,” Bandeira explained to Ikon his interview. “His reality has been completely ripped apart. He’s suffering from severe mental health problems.” Rather than playing Evans as a straightforward antagonist, Bandeira located his humanity, understanding him as someone seeking escape, or perhaps oblivion. In one particularly striking moment, Hawkins directed the nude scenes between Evans and Holly (played by Natalie Quarry) as a kind of warfare – a power struggle where vulnerability becomes a weapon. “You’re going into battle,” Hawkins told Bandeira. “You want to look each other down and see who’s going to break first. That’s not going to be you – you’re going to win.”

Natalie Quarry, in her first major film role, brings luminous complexity to Holly Spurring, an actress who volunteers for this impossible mission. Quarry’s Holly is caught between aspiration and dread, between her desire to stretch herself as an artist and the genuine terror of what the role demands. “I think in finding Holly, I found a lot of her through my own experience,” Quarry reflected, noting that she drew parallels between Holly’s exposure and her own vulnerability as an actor experiencing intimacy work for the first time. Quarry observed that Hawkins was unusually collaborative about these scenes. Rather than the typical director-actor dynamic, he engaged in genuine conversation with his actors about boundaries and comfort, anticipating the role of the intimacy coordinator that would later become standard practice.

Ben Bela Böhm plays Max Meyer, a celebrated German film director brought in to helm the project. Ronni Ancona, John McCrea, Ollie Maddigan, and Oscar Hoppe complete the ensemble – each bringing specificity to characters who might, in lesser hands, dissolve into caricature. Hawkins’ script ensures they don’t. “Each member of the group has enough interiority to transcend caricature,” as one critic noted, and the concluding epilogues revealing each character’s fate lend a poignant final dimension.

Made in Twenty-One Days

Perhaps most remarkable is that Think of England was shot in just twenty-one days on a shoestring budget. This is not incidental information – it’s central to understanding the film’s achievement. Produced by father-daughter team Nick and Poppy O’Hagan under their newly formed Giant Films banner, the production exemplifies how bold, ambitious cinema can emerge from severe constraint.

Poppy O’Hagan, the younger producer, spoke about the philosophy guiding their approach. Rather than pursuing ‘traditional financing’ (BFI, BBC, Channel 4) that would have required compromises to the story, Giant Films chose to protect the filmmaker’s vision above all else. “We want to protect Richard’s vision,” she emphasised. “That doesn’t mean give him everything he walks off with every time because that’s not the reality. It means protecting what he wants in terms of storytelling.”

This protection extended to casting decisions. With limited resources, they couldn’t offer lucrative salaries and couldn’t wait months for casting. Instead, they discovered talent through a combination of traditional agents and personal networks. Sarah Cunningham, the cinematographer, arrived at the project partly through serendipitous geography – she and Hawkins had both travelled from nearly identical locations in Shropshire, a coincidence that felt significant enough to seal the collaboration. Cunningham brought extraordinary visual precision to the shoot, constrained by the need to shoot in multiple formats across different aspect ratios (the film plays with black-and-white, colour, and various screen dimensions to represent different versions of reality).

The production designer credit was split between David Hand, a local artist and craftsperson who lives near Hawkins, and Chris Richmond, a more traditionally experienced production designer. This hybrid approach emerged not from a grand plan but from practical necessity – and it worked magnificently.

Filming took place partly at Shinfield Studios in Reading and on location on windswept Anglesey in North Wales in late summer 2024. The weather was brutal – exposed, unpredictable, cold, according to Hawkins. Yet this harshness informed the film’s visual language. Sarah Cunningham deliberately leaned into harsh, unflinching lighting rather than soft, forgiving glow. She drew inspiration from 1940s cinematography, when lights were hot and stocks were slow, creating hard shadows and dramatic contrasts. “I deliberately want to lean into the sort of danger of harsh lighting, sometimes unflattering lighting, hard shadows, which has its own beauty because it has a body,” Cunningham explained. “It’s not just sort of anaemic.”

Intimacy as a Central Concern

The film’s treatment of intimacy work deserves particular attention. Hawkins brought an intimacy coordinator onto set – a now-standard practice that barely existed when he first attempted to write the script. Yet he was fascinated by this relatively new profession and what it represented. “You could argue that this film goes back to the invention of intimacy coordination,” he observed. In Think of England, we see Holly Spurring extensively discussing with the director her comfort, her fears, her boundaries around nudity and sexual choreography. This meta-textual element feels almost like a reclamation of what intimacy coordination tries to be at its best: a genuine conversation about vulnerability and safety.

For the actors, this approach was revelatory. Bandeira spoke about the freedom Hawkins allowed him to be vulnerable, to explore the character’s despair and disconnection without judgment. Quarry found herself drawn into genuine collaboration about what she would and wouldn’t do, feeling respected rather than objectified. “It felt like doing choreography,” she said of the intimate scenes. “It was really fun, and it was like doing a dance. It was like choreography.” Most telling was her reflection on watching the scenes with an audience: even moments she had approached with dread became, when witnessed collectively, unexpectedly moving.

The Comedy That Isn’t

An intriguing tension runs through the interviews and Hawkins’ own remarks: the question of whether Think of England is a comedy. When Quarry first read the script, she didn’t laugh. She found it tragic. “I never really saw it as a comedy because I was always looking at it from Holly’s eyes, and it’s not funny. It’s not,” she explained.

Then came the world premiere screening. As the audience laughed at moments of profound absurdity: the impossibility of the task, the collisions between characters’ competing needs and traumas – something shifted. “I was like, really, it is funny,” Quarry realised. Hawkins’ point seems to be that the film doesn’t depend on comedy as a genre convention. Rather, the inherent contradiction of the premise—a government so repressed it censors intimacy yet demands the creation of pornography – contains a farcical quality that audiences recognise instinctively. The humour emerges from the gap between official morality and actual human need.

A Political Mirror

At its deepest level, Think of England functions as a political allegory. The film interrogates who controls moral narratives and for what purposes. In wartime, the contradiction becomes acute: demand sexual abstinence in peacetime, yet create stimulation in war. Control the moral landscape to maintain power, yet manipulate sexual appetite to fuel violence. Hawkins drew parallels to contemporary moments – the hypocrisy of those who impose strict moral codes while transgressing them privately, the way authoritarian movements historically begin by policing sexuality before escalating to violence.

“Before war comes propaganda and lies,” Hawkins noted. “In that sense, the film resonates with today’s reality. I wanted the film to be a reminder not to accept what we’re hearing.” This isn’t a lecture. Rather, it’s an artistic interrogation of power that trusts audiences to recognise parallels themselves.

What Makes It Defiant

Think of England defies expectations, often veering into uncomfortable darkness, courtesy of Corporal Evans. The film consistently refuses the easy path. It could be crude propaganda satire (imagine a lesser version playing for laughs). It could be an earnest period drama (imagining noble sacrifice). Instead, it occupies an ambiguous middle ground where characters are sympathetic yet terrible, where survival requires moral compromise, and where genuine vulnerability exists alongside genuine menace.

Evans, in particular, functions as the film’s dark conscience. Bandeira’s performance ensures we never quite locate him – he remains dangerous, unpredictable, and yet profoundly human. His presence forces other characters to confront their own complicity. Holly wants to be an actress; Evans reminds her of the cost. The government wants morale-boosting footage; Evans embodies the actual trauma they’re trying to sublimate.

This refusal of comfort extends to the film’s ending. Rather than resolving into a neat dramatic climax, it offers epilogues revealing each character’s eventual fate. Some endure. Some don’t. Some find unexpected grace; others find only diminishment. It’s the opposite of triumphalist cinema – it’s honest about how history treats the individuals caught in its machinery. And yet, it comes with a twist: “the epilogue is completely made up,” admits Hawkins. He continues, “There is this third unwritten rule you absolutely can’t do in cinema – write fake epilogues; and that’s the one I was prepared to break”.

Independent Cinema as Act of Resistance

Think of England’s success at PÖFF carries implications beyond its own merits. Giant Films has explicitly positioned itself in opposition to streaming consolidation and formula filmmaking. “Our intention is to actually make it possible for more smaller-budget films to be made,” Nick O’Hagan stated. The production model – rapid shooting, protective collaboration with the director, hiring people with real talent who aren’t simply chasing maximum pay – suggests an alternative to the current ecosystem of independent film.

This matters because cinema like Think of England – uncompromising, formally adventurous, thematically complex – cannot survive if producers demand the same return on investment as commercial projects. Only when filmmakers are willing to work quickly and cheaply for the sake of the work itself can projects this ambitious emerge. Hawkins, the O’Hagans, and their team didn’t start with a budget to fill or a commercial template to follow. They started with a vision and figured out how to serve it within brutal constraints.

The Education of an Ensemble

Speaking to the cast reveals something else valuable: what happens when a director creates conditions for genuine exploration rather than efficient execution. Bandeira spoke about bringing dangerous energy onto set, physically separating himself from other actors before scenes to maintain psychological intensity. Quarry described how watching the finished film opened her understanding of what she’d created – she hadn’t fully appreciated the comedic dimensions while performing them. Böhm and the ensemble were trusted to find their characters rather than being directed to predetermined results.

This is the opposite of contemporary production cultures that prioritise safety through over-explanation, protection through reduction of ambiguity. Hawkins’ approach demanded more from his actors – more risk, more vulnerability, more faith that the character exists within them waiting to be discovered rather than installed from above.

Think of England arrives at a moment when cinema needs reminders that it can be dangerous, that it can ask uncomfortable questions, that it can refuse easy answers. Hawkins has created a film that respects the intelligence of its audience while refusing to grant them moral comfort. It’s formally inventive, thematically rich, and politically urgent without being didactic.

The interviews with cast and crew reveal a filmmaker and producers operating from principle rather than calculation – protecting artistic vision, hiring based on talent and alignment rather than name recognition, working with urgency and focus rather than sprawling budgets. Most importantly, they created conditions where actors could take genuine risks and discover genuine depths within themselves and their characters.

In an industry increasingly dominated by franchises, retreads, and content designed for algorithmic distribution, Think of England announces something worth hearing: that cinema can still be an act of artistic courage. That a film can be made in twenty-one days on a budget that wouldn’t cover the craft services of a prestige production. That an ensemble of actors – some with significant experience, some making their film debuts – can create work of genuine depth under a director who trusts them.