A former student from Plymouth is making waves in Hollywood – even snagging Quentin Tarantino as producer of her latest documentary.
Megan Raney left Plymstock School’s sixth form in 1995 and, after attending university in London and working in North America, developed a passion
for filmmaking.
Now living and working in California, she and her brother Colin Gray have formed a production company, The Sibs, which is gaining a high profile among film industry players.
Megan and Colin recently visited the UK for a showing of their film, Freedom’s Fury, at the Barbican in London.
Five years in the making, the flick follows events leading up to the ill-fated Hungarian Revolution of 1956, featuring political history interwoven with preparations for, and matches during, the water polo competition at the Australian Olympics in the same year.
The film reaches a climax with the famous ‘blood in the water’ semi-final between Hungary and Russia. Yeah, well it’s not that famous actually. We had to look it up. Apparently, that game turned into a brawl as Hungary’s players did what they could to protest the Soviet Union’s invasion of their homeland weeks earlier. Être et avoir eat your proverbial heart out.
Either way, it’s safe to say that there probably weren’t a huge amount of documentary makers clambering to tell this story and you’d imagine the market for it would be fairly, shall we say, niche.
However, the film’s executive producers Quentin Tarantino and Lucy Lui (yes, you read that correctly!) seem to think it has wider potential and it has already been shown at Robert De Niro’s Tribeca Film Festival in New York. Quelle swish.
Since then, the movie has earned The Sibs rave reviews (‘A stunning, mandatory, must-see film’ – Cosmopolitan, ‘Truly enthralling’ – Elle), and even the Order of the Knight’s Cross on behalf of the Hungarian Republic. Indeed, some folks are even suggesting the flick could pick up an Oscar next month.
But The Sibs haven’t let things go to their heads. They’re in production for their third feature documentary, Prisoners of Faith, developing two independent scripts and planning to make their narrative feature film directorial debut.
Stay tuned to D+CFilm to find out how they get on. Oh, and here’s the trailer for Freedom’s Fury. It’s a pretty dodgy ‘copy’ but you get the idea.
Posted by Thin White Duke
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well,I never.Interesting.Water polo eh?
Young water polo players in every country in the world were brought up hearing the legend of this match, Old, fat and retired water polo players are waiting for the DVD to come out.