Words by Bailey Alexander
R.M. Moses speaks to us about navigating challenges and the crafting of his acclaimed short film Saving Art ahead of its US premiere.
R.M. Moses is a bit of a star. Okay, so maybe not even ‘a bit’ of a star, but maybe an actual certified star? Fast rising up the ranks of Britain’s promising filmmakers, his short film Saving Art is being lauded, earning a slew of nods from institutions such as BAFTA and the British Short Film Awards. As if it couldn’t get any better, Moses is now taking it across the pond, giving it its US premiere at the Slamdance Film Festival in Park City, Utah this coming January.
Influenced by a range of movies from The Pursuit of Happyness, to Moonlight and Kurosawa’s Cure, Saving Art follows a single father’s struggle with his son’s terminal diagnosis, portraying his experience with a level of nuance that will leave even the most stoic of watchers a little dry-throated.
The idea for the film was based on one of Moses’ own familial experiences, “When I first wrote it, it was very fresh and only a year after my niece got diagnosed. She went into remission within 30 days, and when I wrote it I based it on her experience and the experiences of other children in the same ward”. Writing the ending first as it was the part that moved him the most, he still found himself “crying every single time” during the process of writing and redrafting. Using it as his final project for his film school course, he says it eventually “became so fictional and so far away from those original stories that it became easier to detach”.
Coming of age during the DSLR revolution, Moses was 15 when he first got into film through a photography course before later getting a DSLR camera for his 16th birthday, “I started just doing YouTube content for two or three years and music videos for the stereotypical rappers on the estate. That’s kind of where I learned how to like film and edit. I then wanted to kind of combine it with my English Literature skills, so I just started making short films straight away”
On top of the 30 films he made during this time, before going into production on Saving Art Moses was a part of around 20 films during his three years at film school, garnering experience as the sound guy, the cinematographer, and everything in between. Perhaps most importantly, he gained a strong grasp on storytelling, something he weaves throughout Saving Art with the help of a variety of nuances. Still, telling the story presented a new challenge: working with kids.
Working with children, let alone on a story as emotional as Saving Art, is a notion that even Hollywood’s greats would probably shy away from, but not R.M. Moses: “It was just fun, like the whole shoot was so much fun. Our green room was just crazy, bananas, because there was even a football in there, arts & crafts, just so much fun everyday. There was never any overhang from the theme of the film”.
Okay so maybe that aspect turned out to be not so much of a challenge, but squeezing a heartfelt story into a scant 15 minute runtime still sounds brutal, “You have to be strict, and there’s this phrase of “Killing your darlings”, and that you can’t be possessive and precious. I think with short films, you become more programmable in film festivals around the world if you have something between 10 and 15 minutes. So that was always the aim: thinking politically as well as where it was going to screen”.
Having already garnered critical acclaim and due to finish its festival in January, the next natural step is to release to a wider audience, with hopes of Saving Art finding the general public sometime next year. In the meantime, R.M. Moses is focusing on writing scripts for a feature film adaptation of Saving Art, with hopes it will be similar to its predecessor yet different with more of a horror influence. Regardless, like a true auteur, Moses’ focus isn’t on adding more accolades to his resumé, but on getting more eyes on his work and the story of Saving Art.