Can House Trailer from maxy neil bianco on Vimeo.
In a broken old port town stranded deep up north, a strange, magical,shrine-like building has appeared. in a neighborhood falling into such profound decline that the street lights have been switched off and many houses have been boarded up waiting for new development that may never come,one particular pebble dashed council house has mysteriously blossomed into new life, covered with ever more intricate and beautiful patterns, patterns made out of Fosters beer cans, like some alcoholic gingerbread house at the end of the world.
The Can House is a DIY social club, a lighthouse in a stormy sea: the big society's drunk and it draws them in like moths to a flame. There's a thousand stories on the side of that house: for every eight cans there's a drunken man for every 150 they've had a party...
Tragically, the Can House soon faces demolition, to make way for a new flatpack ikea style estate. The director of this film, seduced by the peculiar, bust-up beauty of the Can House, decided he had to create a record of it, and the life inside it.
The can House is a piece of contemporary folk art, made by Phil, a man on the margins of society, a man who's life is in freefall. This is what you come up with when you run out of nothing- the Can House is an act of defiance, a two fingers up to the hand of fate, to a world slowly degenerating and disappearing. It is a memorial to alcoholism and to wasted lives, but it is also an act of creativity that gives Phil's life a sense of meaning, that helps it make some kind of sense.
The film's not just about contemporary folk art, it's a piece of contemporary in it's self. The director, Maxy Neil Bianco, learned how to make a film by doing this one, and it's shot through with the same makeshift, ramshackle poetry as its subject. maxy's creative endeavor rhymes with Phil's. Micheal Smith(The culture Show, and BBC documentaries Citizen Smith, drive time and Deep North) with Clare Tavernor as producer helped maxy shape and forge the material. The film is by turns funny, tragic, heroic, pathetic, and most of all human, a testimony to the creativity and resilience of human spirit.