This is the story of woman’s struggle for her sanity and her love for her child. FAITH stays locked in her flat, petrified to go out, with her moody, controlling boyfriend MANCE. She dreams of the day she can have her daughter back but she has lost all sense of reality. The only world that seems safe for her is the dollhouse that she played with as child.

NELL, now 7, has been brought up by Faith’s sister, ERIS. Facing the big 40, Eris has arranged for the child to be adopted to pursue what she sees as her last chance of love. Nobody, especially Mance, wants a rape child.

Pregnant with Mance’s baby, Faith has to prove she can be a mother to Nell if she is to go through with the birth. The only way is for her to take Nell into to her fantasy world of the dolls but, as reality creeps in, this ‘happy place’ starts to reveal itself as a thin veil over her terrifying past.

As her boyfriend and sister turn increasingly against her, and Nell feels once more betrayed, Faith is left to face the thing that she fears most — herself.

Okay so here goes from a complete computer illerate , i feel proud of my self for being able to find the page to post something , and even more thankful to the man who spent the time in setting this up it has been intresting for me to read , what there is on the web , peoples memories of meeting me in what was now a decade ago ,thats you David seems you had alot of faith that we could have created some thing and that you could have directed a decent performance out of me i am not sure that i was open enough for that to have happened but i am sorry we never got to find out (I also hope that the spelling may have improved , albeit with spell check) and to read some of the points of view that i had on inane things , or maybe just inane points of view i thought to share , imbarassing !!!!

Still life has been full of many lessons, some re learned again and again some not needed repeating. All have helped form me , 2 years from thirty,with a strong family around me who support and love me ,who postively encourage me working , creating, and being focused, who i am slowly showing that i can be there for them in the way that they deserve, who have watched me grow from the nieve, obnocious, self important, self involved adult that i thought i was, in to a mother, a human being, who though has strong belives political, humantrian,ecological,could and should to more to support them with action as with and the community that has embraced her and her child life is good i am lucky to be able to say , and pray not to have jinxed it.
i have few very good friends, alot of friends, a bike, love and a love of dancing.

last year i was given the oppurnity of work.
some thing that had not been intrusted to me in a long time, and rightly so, not the right head and not the right time. but i wish i could explain to you who ever finds this intersting enough to have gotten this far , the utter freedom and electricty created by working how alive and…. shit i know that there is so many people who it takes to make a film , a show, a play happen the devotion of so much time and energy the relating and ideas created by those around one , but on a completely selfish level it fed me more than i could have imagined and is some thing i came home from alive in a sense that i had not been creatively for a long time ( part of the work i know was started in a class i take by sam rumbelow who has been showing me the beginings of the possibilites of acting from truth )Now I have started i could go on and on it seems but not wanting to ramble nor get too personal I shall stop .

I truly hope that those of you who get the oppurtinity to watch wild decembers , can enjoy it just half as much as i did making it and playing Breege.
I am headed to Ireland to do the ADR on it later this month and i will then get my first glimpse of it , nervous, excited worried, the Irish accent has left me , so will be practicing most of the time, hope fully meet up with Matt Ryan and Owen before.
I am so pleased to have worked and secretly pleased it is not all over.

Lara

“Wild Decembers” rewiew:

“Violet Hill, fluid, flowing, a brindled phantom upon the mountain in the early morning, a vision that streaked back and forth like a painted picture and then again in the dusk, becoming one with the dusk, except for her eyes, which glowed wildly.” This description of a magnificent racing greyhound illustrates the wild, dark, stream-of-consciousness style which has made Edna O’Brien something of a legend in her long career. Her 22nd work of fiction, Wild Decembers, is as stormy and bittersweet as its title, telling an age-old tale in a way that sweeps away the cobwebs and exposes the bare nerves of human pride.

O’Brien has inspired comparisons with some of the literary greats, including Emily Brontë, Virginia Woolf, Flannery O’Connor and even Colette. But her style is very much her own, often bitter and acidic, yet paradoxically brimming with rambunctious, sensual life. Wild Decembers is all about the struggle between two men to claim a patch of land on a mountain in Cloontha, western Ireland. The sister of one of the men falls in love with the rival. What could be more timeworn, even cliched, than a simple struggle for dominance and birthright, complicated by forbidden love? Yet O’Brien’s telling is so masterful that it is as if this situation has never been heard of before.

The two men, Joseph Brennan and Mick Bugler, are distantly related, “the warring sons of warring sons,” locked in “the crazed and phantom lust for a lip of land.” Brennan’s people have been farming on the land for generations, so he sees Mick Bugler as an interloper and a pretender. Bugler is not even Irish, not properly Irish anyway, having come over from a sheep station in Australia to claim his supposed inheritance on the mountain called Slieve Clochan.

And then there is Breege, Joseph’s sensitive and withdrawn younger sister, who has given over her life to caring for her brother. Her considerable passion has been deeply suppressed by a sheltered and stifling existence until Mick Bugler drives in on his shiny-new tractor, stirring in her feelings she has never dared acknowledge before. Though Mick and Joseph make a rather forced show of friendship at the beginning, Bugler’s intentions to encroach on Brennan’s land soon become clear. Even the suggestion that Breege may be attracted to Bugler causes Joseph to subject her to a vicious beating which leaves her cowed with terror.

This is the first of many shocks in Wild Decembers. Up to this point, Joseph strikes us as a broody and obsessive, but basically decent, human being who only wants what he believes is rightfully his. The beating strips away this veneer to reveal a seething, hateful jealousy that will eventually drive him to even more desperate acts of violence. The roots of this hatred are impossible to find, buried deep in past generations, fueled and fed both by historic injustice and even the most innocent acts in the present day.

Rest of rewiew at:

http://januarymagazine.com/fiction/wilddecembers.html

Echoes is a short film about a sex trafficker called Anya who is faced with a moral dilemma when she discovers that a young girl that she is trafficking (from Lithuania to London) is pregnant.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1279081/

this is interview from 2001:

Sam Taylor-Wood:

“Lara Belmont rose to the challenge of starring in `The War Zone’, her first film, with strength and vulnerability. What I saw on the screen was someone who had not been trained in any way. Who was totally open and natural. I’m looking forward to seeing a lot more of her on the big screen.”

LARA BELMONT

Discovered at 13 by Isabella Blow, Lara Belmont spent her early teens modelling. At 18 she was spotted again, this time by a casting agent. Belmont went on to win the role of Jessie in Tim Roth’s The War Zone, for which she won Best Newcomer at the 1999 British Independent Film Awards.

What are the five things most often said about you?

Lara Belmont: Spun-out, positive, moody, sympathetic, generous.

The reason you get out of bed every morning is…

I don’t get out of bed, that’s the reason why I want a job.

If you could take only one item into the next century, what would it be?

My sanity – it’s not something I want to lose.

What’s the first thing you’ll do when you wake up in the 21st century?

Feel dazed and confused then take a paracetamol.

The person you’d most like to be stuck in a lift with…

Scarlet, my best mate, because we do everything together.

By this time next year…

I’ll have joined CND, got my driving licence, achieved inner happiness and finished a pint.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/mediaselector/check/hampshire/realmedia/bigscreen/bigscreen_openskies?size=16×9&bgc=BLUE&nbram=1&bbram=1

(You will need Real Player installed)

If it were not for the brilliant portrayal of a family in which the married couple are no longer in love with each other, this would be only slightly better than a normal crime story. The relationship has reached a stage in which even banal conversations between the parents of two boys and a young adult daughter are likely to end in ugly arguments. Tom Forrester, played by Michael Maloney, is too busy running his business to have enough time for his family. His wife, Jen, played by Jemma Redgrave, is a busy mother who is dissatisfied with her role, and regrets not having continued with her work. This relationship is the main story, and the two characters keep up a tension throughout the film between their dissatisfaction with their partner and their remaining hopes for happy family life.

Jen organises a house swap with the family of an Australian professor for the Christmas holidays. While they are staying in Australia, the professor, Charles Anderson, played by Jonathan Cake, steals various belongings from the house in England.

There are various twists in the tale, which keep up the interest in the criminal part of the story, and also increase the likelihood of the family pulling together through adversity.

The supporting cast were very good. Rose Trenchard, played by Phyllida Law, was a very credible typical older lady neighbour, and Lissa, the nineteen-year-old daughter of the family, played by Lara Belmont, was very convincing as a young adult slightly disturbed by the constant arguing of her parents.

Following the various twist and turns in the story, the film reaches a dramatic final scene in which the married couple play out a thoroughly logical and satisfying ending, and even this may not be what one is expecting.