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Invisible Pictures

Last year Sarah Reeve and I embarked on our third film project, Invisible Pictures. I was aiming for something smaller and quieter than Gwenevere or Prairie Rascals, and we wanted to work in black and white for a change. I also fancied adapting someone else's story rather than coming up with my own. 

I'd always thought Stefan Zweig's short story The Invisible Collection would make a good film. It's set in Germany in the 1920s (around the time it was written) but I assumed it could be updated and relocated. However, when I reread it, I realised that the runaway inflation of the Weimar era was a load-bearing element for which I could think of no good modern substitute. So we found ourselves with another period piece on our hands. 

Luckily, our local steam railway, the South Devon Railway, were very helpful and let us film on one of their regular Buckfastleigh-Totnes services, and parts of Totnes served well enough for a German town. (Excellent Totnes booksellers The Eastgate Bookshop let us use their stockroom as a base of operations). 

For the house where most of the action takes place we really needed a gloomy  mansion full of Beidermeier furniture, and we didn't have one. But, while my house doesn't look like an early 20th Century German one, I don't think it looks entirely like an early 21st Century English one either, so we hid the telly and the fridge, put bakelite light switches over all our modern plastic ones, and hoped for the best. Sarah's black and white photography does a lot to establish the mood.

The story had to be altered in other ways too: the original has quite a complicated set-up, about an art dealer going to visit an old client whose collection of prints he wants to buy. It works on the page, but it would have involved a couple of minutes of voice-over to explain it on screen. In the end, I cut to the chase by making him an art thief. And the collection of prints became a single painting, because looking at a picture on a wall seemed more cinematic than leafing through a folio. The old collector in the story is a man, but we made her a woman because we wanted a good part for Laura Frances-Martin. (Her family name, Herwerth, comes from the story, but once we were shooting I wished I'd changed that too, as it proved tricky to pronounce...) Anyway, I hope Mr Zweig wouldn't disapprove too much of what we ended up with - I maintained the central idea of his story, and, as you'll see, it's a good one. 

Invisible Pictures was shot over four days in October 2025, and stars Laura, Rosanna Lambert, and Nicholas de Jasay. Nick Riddle created the haunting score, and the runtime is around 17 minutes. Please take a look, and, if you like it, spread the word!

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