Lewes Cinema - Snow Cake

Brighton-based writer Angela Pell tells me she used to write ‘bad poetry’ and ‘unsuccessful sit-coms’. She stopped writing after she gave birth to her son Johnny, who was diagnosed as being severely autistic. A few years later, in 2004, she decided to try writing a film script for something that she felt that she ‘would like to watch’. The result was Snow Cake. Revolution Films took it on as a project, Alan Rickman came on board, and then Sigourney Weaver. Rickman plays a British character called Alex, who ends up in snowy Wawa, Ontario, trying to deal with the repercussions of a tragic accident. He finds himself involved with an eccentric, high-functioning autistic woman named Linda (Weaver).
Angela says about the process of making the film: “there have been some amazing highs and lows”, for example, spending an unexpected week in Canada working on the script with director Marc Evans, and actors Rickman and Weaver, whilst a funding crisis held up filming. Fortunately the crisis was resolved, Snow Cake was completed in 2006, and is now on general release and showing at Lewes Cinema on Sunday 10th December. In an article for the National Autistic Society, Angela says: “In a nut-shell, the film is about one week in a man’s life, as he learns to live in the present, to exorcise his demons. While writing the script, I drew upon my experience of being a parent of an autistic child, but I didn’t initially set out to write a film about autism. What I wanted was to put my protagonist somewhere surreal, where the normal rules of engagement didn’t apply. I looked around at my son who was banging me (lovingly) on the knee with a plastic bottle, whilst excitedly and repetitively shouting the words ‘be careful potatoes’, and that’s when I thought… aha!”