About My Brother the devil

The film tackles taboos of masculinity, identity and desire within street culture that have rarely been seen on screen before. Using mainly non-actors and shot entirely on the streets of London’s Hackney, it creates a vivid picture of young people growing up on the streets and the pressures that surround them. Hosaini weaves a gripping script and a documentary style realism with just enough sentimentality to get your heart pumping. Sally recently received the Best British Newcomer Award at the London Film Festival and we were super excited to catch up with her and visit the estate where the film was shot.

 

 To begin with, everybody tells you how difficult it is to make a film, so I approached it with the mentality of, ‘if you only have one film to make before you die, what’s that one film going to be?’ If I’m going to go through all the blood sweat and tears, it better be something that I care about. I wanted it to be cinematic and one of the things that I came up against was a lot of the urban movies that had been made before. I’m not a particular fan of that genre and My Brother the Devil was in fact a reaction against that. I was often told when people read the script, “We’ve seen this before, this is for TV.” It was hard to explain to them if they just read the script and didn’t meet me, they’d have a certain preconception, so when approaching investors about the project, I had to try to explain my visual approach to the film. I had mood boards, photographs and essays on the visual language of the film. I made a small documentary with the real boys that inspired the film to show how you could have something authentic and realistic yet also something that is poetic and lyrical.