What did the distributor Metrodome find attractive about Shifty?
Jezz: I'm Jezz Vernon. I'm Head of Marketing at Metrodome Film Distribution. We acquired Shifty having seen it last year and I think our first and most important point is that cinema can be so much more than big studio blockbusters.
It doesn't just have to be Star Wars orSpiderman. I think great cinema, great British cinema, can be about a place that you might live, about people you might know. It can involve stories that might be familiar to you. It really doesn't have to be an Americanised view of the world.
There's some fantastic cinema out there which comes from Britain, from London and other regions, and I think really in doing these screenings we're just trying to get people to see how diverse cinema is in Britain today.
One of the important things for us at Metrodome about Shifty was - although it is an urban genre film which obviously brings to mind films like Bullet Boy, Kidulthood, Adulthood - it's not just a group of anecdotes and stories about drug dealing scrapes and scrapes with the police, at the focus, at the heart of it.
There are just two people getting to know each other again after four years apart and that's really a universal story about friendship which can translate into any film. So although it is an urban genre film, it's very important that at the heart of it, it's telling a real story, that it's not just a bunch of anecdotes strung together to make a film.