Hope Eternal           visit www.hopethefilm.com

Hope eternal was completed in Feb 2008 and is to open at the Guardian Hay festival on May 28 2008.

What a passionate and intense film Hope Eternal is. It has your signature from the start. I love the notes and the crosscutting between Africa and Wales, and that he dies so early in the picture. I love the mobility of it, that she is constantly on the move and, though I do not myself believe in god, I was moved by its piety and metaphysics

Africa is most definitely not the backdrop in Hope Eternal…  MARK COUSINS CRITIC

OUTLINE OF FILM

Hope Eternal is a 2 hour film and tells the story of a Madagascan nurse working in a TB and Aids hospice in the Congo. With her is Bantu, her young teen daughter, whose father has abandoned her as a child.

When not in work, Hope helps trafficked street kids get well; she mothers them, houses them, teaches them, protecting them from sexual abuse. Hope collects the details of abuse stories for a Charity which we read about in our media.

Her life is always in danger. Hope understands sick men. She has been a trafficked woman from age 8 - 17. She finds it easier to love children than trust men.

She meets a Welsh doctor. His name is Evan. Evan has given up his soft medical life in Britain to work in the Congo. They fall in love. They make plans to see Wales and help the World, and he introduces Bantu, the 14 yr old daughter of Hope to the passions of rugby. Bantu loves rugby and especially the inspiration of Shane Williams, the Welsh rugby International.

The film moves from the Congo to another hospice in the Copper belt of Northern Zambia. The love story is beautiful and brief. Evan has helped save age old family artefacts from Art Traffickers. For this he is punished. Hope's ID is stolen; without Identity a person is lost in Africa. Now Hope and Bantu have to cross Africa through Zambia, into Zimbabwe and South Africa collecting birth information for her and Bantu in order to become a person again. Good people help, and the bad destroy. .......

Hope Eternal Stars Christine Rochat Genoud, Lusungha Munthali and Richard Harrinton. Karl Francis writes and directs.

Derith Rhisiart produces.

FILM MAKING NOTES

I found myself watching the film over and over again - inspiring me..

The film challenges style and ideas; its about the vulnerability if women and children, how easily trust can be stolen and used; it wants to be about empowering women, as Hope in her notes to the director explains. It wants to be about the emotional journey of an African woman and yes it is a women's film; it fights stereotype.

Hope is a film which mixes genre. It is very real, it is a road movie, beautifully filmed by Nigel Walters; and it is about God. God is not ignored or turned into a warm bath time candle burning. Dying Africans know God. It is a long poem of images and still a simple story. A very good yarn.  Not a Hollywood film, 90% of the cast are black women, Hope Eternal uses local languages be they Welsh, English, French, Bemba Swahili, or Afrikaans, to touch the heart.

Wyndham Price Film maker

WORKING ON THE FILM, The film challenges style and ideas; its about the vulnerability if women and children, how easily trust can be stolen and used; it wants to be about empowering women, as Hope in her notes to the director explains. It wants to be about the emotional journey of an African woman and yes it is a women's film; it fights stereotype.

CAROLINE LYNCH - BLOSSE  FILM EDITOR

"In a very unusual perhaps original way the filmmaker uses what he calls Notes from Hope to the Director. The first note instructs the Director to make sure his film empowers women, and in the second note she tells the director he is foolish to make a film about Africa because people will switch the television off. ......

Mark Boucher photographer and Lecturer

"Artistically, it uses words and film in a totally new way for a feature drama, echoes of Silent Cinema perhaps, but original...

"Perhaps the objective of this technique is to engage the audience in their own vulnerability.... what it clearly succeeds in doing is uniting film with modern literature ....it is as if Karl Francis wants to wake up film and shake drama and documentary out of its deadly propagandist dumming down rut ... Hope Eternal .. fights stereotype........

Karl Francis writer director of Hope Eternal

The original short film is HOPE a kind of smaller charcoal drawing for the oil painting HOPE ETERNAL became...  its unusual for a filmmaker to work this way ...S4C commissioned HOPE .. an opportunity few media companies would offer any filmmaker..... Bloom Street productions completed HOPE ETERNAL
Derith Rhisiart producer