Some film-makers have unrealistic expectations for their work; Aneil Karia is not one of them. “I’m not deluded enough to think that it’s going to bring down the government,” he says of his new film, Vote Gavin Lyle – but you never know, it just might. A funny, clever, superbly acted, small-but-perfectly-formed satire, Vote Gavin Lyle stars Jack Lowden as a wannabe Reform-style parliamentary candidate for the fictional middle-England constituency of Fletcham and Wold. At just 16 minutes long, it absolutely skewers the far-right mindset; not the minority-bashing, flag-hoisting street thugs, but the cannier, well-spoken Farageists who dominate the tendency’s leadership.
Without wanting to give away the film’s final flourish, it’s fair to say that there’s an element of empathy, even sympathy for its central character. Karia says: “I don’t think it’s interesting or useful to look at these people – far-right politicians, councillors, prospective candidates, whoever – and just say what nasty bastards they are. I think what strikes me about them is they’re just as vulnerable and scared as the rest of us.
“I feel like we’ve slipped into the kind of culture where everything becomes a kind of intellectual ping pong, people relentlessly yelling at each other. And without being pretentious, as a film-maker I thought I wanted to get under that and observe the humanity beneath it all.”
Be that as it may, Karia brings a personal edge to the film : “I grew up in Ipswich with plenty of people who I still know who probably vote Reform.” And Lyle is certainly a memorable creation: there’s something Partridgean about his awkwardness and obtuseness, his pandering for attention and the bubbling fantasies just below the surface. But the existence of the film is a somewhat unlikely proposition: Karia is an established feature-film director who last year released a well-received adaption of Hamlet, starring Riz Ahmed. His 2020 film Surge, featuring Ben Whishaw as an airport security office who has a breakdown, had plenty of admirers too. In between the two Karia won an Oscar for another short film, The Long Goodbye, a genuinely scary what-if drama about violent far-right raids on British Asian families. Vote Gavin Lyle takes a different tack from The Long Goodbye: lighter, funnier, but in its way just as politically committed.
Returning to the short film format may not seem an obvious step, but Karia is keen to stress their value. “I find them really creatively rich and an interesting playground to take slightly bolder choices and experiments. For instance, comedy has not really been part of my journey, and I thought, OK, I want to try something in a totally different tone.” Karia’s strong track record in short films puts him in the unusual position of being as well known for his smaller-scale projects as his features. As well as The Long Goodbye, Karia was the director picked by Stormzy to shoot Big Man, the musician’s high-profile first venture into film-making; before that, Karia had worked a number of a times with another British rapper, Kano, on a series of short films and music videos. The pair met while Karia was directing episodes of the TV show Top Boy, in which Kano played the key role of Sully.
One of the more curious elements of Karia’s new film is that it marks another step forward by WePresent, the arts platform of WeTransfer, the file-sharing website that has become popular for its ability to allow users to shove large-sized files around the internet. Karia calls them a “unicorn”, one of the vanishingly few sources he can go to for backing; half a decade ago it was their connection with Ahmed that got The Long Goodbye off the ground.
You might reasonably wonder why a successful but niche tech company would develop a sideline in the commissioned-arts economy. According to its current editor-in-chief Holly Fraser, it is as simple as the fact that the designers who started parent outfit WeTransfer gave the website’s ever changing wallpapers and graphics space to their artist and photographer friends. “What started off as highlighting artists from around the world turned into more of an original commissioning body. One of the earliest ones we did was a film with FKA twigs and it snowballed from there.”
As is the modern way, WePresent’s clout means it can boast a roster of impressive names: along with Ahmed and Karia, it has made films with Letitia Wright and Little Simz, and art projects with Marina Abramović, Robin de Puy and Akinola Davies Jr. And the films they’ve made with Karia show that they don’t pull their punches politically. “I don’t think it’s ever really been a secret what side of the political spectrum we’ve sat on by looking at the work that we do,” Fraser says. “For us, it’s about standing up for what we believe in. Artists have always been very well placed to decipher the world, and I personally have been very disappointed in the rhetoric coming out of certain aspects of the film industry recently that art shouldn’t have a place in politics. I think it’s rubbish.”
As for Karia, he is about to start work on a TV series adapted from Kaliane Bradley’s sci-fi novel The Ministry of Time, inspired by John Franklin’s failed Arctic expediton in the mid-19th century. Meanwhile, Vote Gavin Lyle is going out in the world and will no doubt cause a stir. “I want it to be first of all entertaining, and also thought-provoking. Hopefully it gets people thinking about the fact that often the people who purport to be our saviours are as lost, as inauthentic as we all seem to be in this moment.”