Director Charles Harris tells Dan Carrier that he is only the fourth director to make a Jewish film in Britain in the last 50 years

THE film took seven years to go from a germ of an idea to the screen. And as with most good ideas, film director Charles Harris couldn’t get anyone to stump up the cash to make Paradise Grove.
Having to pitch the idea to possible financiers with the opening line: “It’s a comedy set in a care home in Hampstead,” didn’t help him.
After dragging the film round the usual outlets for funding – the Film Council, the Lottery Film Fund, and independent film backers – he still had had no luck. So Harris, who lives in Frognal, Hampstead, took out a newspaper advert and the response was good.
People with some spare cash could buy a share and, under a Treasury scheme to make it easier to back British movies, use it to get a tax break.
And when he leafed through the 100-plus applications, he realised a large majority of the backers hailed from Camden. His neighbours had decided to help.
Paradise Grove follows the story of Izzie Goldberg, a Jewish grandfather considering his lot from a chair in an NW3 care home. It focuses primarily on the relationship between Izzie and his grandson, a black teenager, and their attempts to get to know one another before he dies.
It is a moving, bleak comedy with music by the internationally renowned Klezmer band The Burning Bush, who hail from Kentish Town.
But despite its success – it has won awards at the Palm Springs Festival of Festivals, Houston WorldFest and Commonwealth Film Festival and is currently into a third week of a run at the Everyman – it very nearly never made it out of Charles Harris’s notebook.
It is due to a problem that is endemic in film making in Britain, he claims – namely for it to get backing, it has to be filed under the label ‘cutting edge’.
He says: “Channel Four, the BBC and the Film Council are only interested in three things: drugs, gangsters and romantic comedies. It has got to be about kids in Lambeth shooting up and falling in love or they just aren’t interested – and this means there is no variety.”
The Americans, he says, are more patient. They are never concerned with getting a perfect script – they will bankroll a rough idea and let the producers work to get it polished. In Britain, you have to turn up with something that needs little work or they will turn their nose up at it.
To get the perfect script you need the finances to let you work on it: independent film makers, because of the huge costs involved, find themselves leading a garret-like existence while they try to nurture their idea to make it sellable – a prospect Harris knows only too well.
He adds: “It is a strange world. It is an art form, but it’s also an industry. No other form of art relies on you being an entrepreneur as well.”
But Harris has made it: his film has attracted bumper crowds in the cinema that is moments from his home of 25 years.
He started his career in film being a dubbing projectionist, the person who makes sure the soundtrack marries up with the action on the screen.
Harris quickly moved on to editing, and it had been a long held dream of his to direct his own film.
He cut his teeth directing fringe plays, including runs at Pentameters in Heath Street and the New End Theatre, and then the idea came for a black comedy about a Jewish care home. He says: “I saw it as a about life itself.”
He was inspired by his many visits to see elderly relatives in care homes across Camden and their experiences inside.
“It’s just like life on the outside – they sit and talk all day long about food, sex and politics,” he says. “That is how Jewish culture works.” He adds that the care home culture means people there have to face philosophical issues about life and death.
“They know there is really only one way out, so now is the time to confront the issues they know they have to face before they die.”
But he refutes the idea that this is a particularly stoical, Jewish attitude towards death and says the film applies to everyone.
But the film brings up the question of what Jewish identity is – and this makes Harris wonder what a Jewish film is.
He says: “One distributor said to me: ‘Jews don’t go to see Jewish films anymore’. I asked him to explain and he said he had heard they were re-releasing Fiddler on the Roof and there had been little interest. As if that proved it. I call it a Jewish black comedy. It is about Jewish people and about Jewish life. And it is one of the few films looking at Jewish life in Britain today.”
He points to other cultures in Britain enjoying previously unseen success in the cinema, from the Bollywood explosion through to black filmmakers, Irish and Scottish film. But there is no comparable Jewish film culture, despite many Jewish people being heavily involved in the visual arts.
He says: “A couple of years ago we had Suzie Gold, and before that there was Leon the Pig Farmer – but before that, there has been nothing but A Kid For Two Farthings, and that was made in 1955. Four films in 50 years – that is quite small pickings.”

• Paradise Grove, certificate 15, is showing at the Everyman Cinema, Hampstead. Call the box office on 0870 0664 777.