If You Ever Get to Heaven – Previewed

by Becca Heaton on July 31, 2010

I was kindly invited to a pre-release screening of If You Ever Get to Heaven; an independent film by Joe Atkins, who I was lucky enough to interview afterwards (the interview will be in the next edition of Beat).

Having sat through many a student and independent film during my Film Studies at University, I prepared myself for an evening of bad acting, ridiculous dialogue, and a story so pretentiously surreal it would bewilder Dali and Bunuel. Thankfully for me, and I’m sure for everyone involved that evening, I wasn’t subjected to any of the above.

The Belstaff family are on holiday in France when the mother Jen, played by Amanda Garwood, upon discovering her husband, Richard Shelton, has been having an affair, abandons him at the petrol station. She and her children travel across France and Spain on a pilgrimage to Santiago de Compostela, picking up and helping eccentric characters, including Jen’s estranged sister, along the way and who in turn help the Belstaff family.

I am a huge fan of films that explore stories and characters that don’t have great big stereotypes hanging over them and ‘If You Ever Get to Heaven’ is definitely one of those films. Jen Belstaff is a strong woman and this film explores that without making her a stereotype, she doesn’t pander to her family, she protects those she cares about…and she does all of this with love and grace – almost a rarity in films these days.

The film itself is quite slow and to be honest I found that rather frustrating, however in the interview with Joe Atkins, I discovered that this was entirely intentional (come back next month for the interview). There were also a few post-production elements that I found pretty distracting, namely the background music which played almost non-stop and averted a lot of my focus away from the story. But, you have to bear in mind that this is a film in pre-release stage, it only finished shooting on July 31st 2009, and finished post-production in April 2010. It is looking for a distributor and will probably under go futher editing.

It is a low-budget, independent European film with an unsual finance structure, the Producers offered 300 separate 50€ investment units to film fans, friends, colleagues etc. with an Associate Producer credit on the movie as well as an invitation to the premiere screening of the completed film.

If You Ever Get To Heaven was budgeted at 15,000€. No-body on the film took an initial fee for their work. after trael expenses and accommodation and food for the cast and crew the budget covered the hire or purchase of the essential hardware needed to get the shots in the can and the costs of post-production.

Despite a couple of niggles here and there, the story won me over completely; the strength of Jen, the relationship she had with her children and the love and kindness and compassion she showed complete strangers really touched me. The ending too was lovely, a little bit of ambiguity can go a long way and I’m thoroughly glad that we weren’t left with a cookie-cutter ending, but an ending that showed the love of a family.