A film director living in Sahtlam has recently completed a feature drama called The Bones on Greenwich Shore.
Ken Barnes said the film, which he has been working on for five years, has been picked up by the New Jersey-based distributing company Bayview Entertainment and he expects it will soon be available on video-on-demand and as a DVD release.
He said the idea for the film, which stars Richard Cotton and Ena Uda, came from a study about how people who share DNA but have never met each other often inexplicably seek each other out when attending the same social function as if a powerful connection existed, drawing them together.
Around the same time as he read the study, Barnes said he was walking along the tidal River Thames in Greenwich, London, and noticed thousands of bones on the gravel foreshore, some of which looked human.
“I tried researching the origins of the bones and there were many theories, including washed-out graves from the Black Plague era, but there was no hard proof, only a regular supply of bones washing up on the beach during strong tides, then disappearing on the next tide,” Barnes said.
“The two experiences stuck in my mind and eventually merged into a fictional story, and the story became a film.”
A synopsis of the film’s storyline on IMDB states that after the death of her mother from bone cancer, “Aiko, a 24-year-old Japanese woman, moves to London to study painting and meets Oliver, a much older British artist.
“Oliver becomes obsessed with her and his new passion revitalizes his art.”
When Aiko poses for him, “the chemistry ignites” but “their relationship is judged harshly by friends” and Oliver’s brother Nathan.
When Oliver stays overnight in her college dorm, he sees a photograph of Aiko’s mother and recognizes her as someone he’d had a brief relationship with 25 years ago on a trip to Aiko’s hometown.
When Aiko tells him that her father died before she was born, Oliver begins to secretly worry that he might be her father.
Plenty of twists and turns follow, leaving the audience guessing until the final frames.
Barnes was born in North Vancouver, and grew up in the Okanagan.
His love of beautiful imagery sent him to the Kootenay School of Art in Nelson for photography, then to Concordia University in Montreal to study filmmaking.
Barnes lived in Japan for 15 years and then studied at Goldsmiths College in London where he received a Masters degree in Screen Documentary in 2006.
After graduation, Barnes worked full time in the film and video world, including NHK, Japan’s national broadcaster, in its London office.
in 2016, he began production of The Bones on Greenwich Shore, which was shot in the UK, with some scenes filmed on Vancouver Island where he returned to live and begin editing the film in 2017, and finally finished the edit in recent months.
“I really missed the smell of the ocean and the forest on the Island, and I found a farmhouse in Sahtlam to rent while I was editing the film,” Barnes said.
robert.barron@cowichanvalleycitizen.com
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