Film director from Llanfilo, Joshua Trigg, has fulfilled his “life’s goal” with the upcoming release of his debut feature film this spring.
Joshua’s film, ‘Satu – Year of the Rabbit’ will be released in March and have its first public screening on February 20 at the well-known BFI IMAX cinema in London, where it is headlining the BFI Future Film Festival.
‘Satu – Year of the Rabbit’ is set in the Asian country of Laos. The film that was supported by Film Hub Wales is about Satu, an orphan child labourer. When a bomb endangers the Pha Tang temple, Satu decides to head north through the rich and feral landscape of Laos in search of his long-lost mother, with his new photojournalist friend Bo.
For the last ten years, former Brecon High School and Christ College student, Joshua, has been commuting to Southeast Asia and back for work, making mini documentaries and commercials, but his ambition was to always make feature films.
The film director told the Brecon & Radnor Express about his passion for filmmaking from his childhood. He said: “I’ve always been making films and videos since I was a kid. I had a lot of friends from the Army Barracks, and they used to get rations that we would use to make SAS style films up in the Beacons.
“I was always obsessed with the idea of making films for fun and it just became my life goal. I ended up moving for university like most people do, where I studied film.”
Discussing Laos and why he decided to set the film there, Josh said: “Laos is a bit of an underdog country. It’s its own little place and I just fell in love with it while making mini documentaries there. It just made sense to write a film set there. I started writing it in the pandemic. It’s the second feature I’ve wrote, but the first one where I decided I was actually going to make it.
The film took five years for Joshua and his team to make.
“It’s a weird one, because it’s been like my life’s goal,” said Joshua. “When I came back from shooting it, I was like right that’s the main goal ticked off the bucket list, the short bucket list which was basically just do that, so it was a bit like what do I do now?
“It has taken a while to sink in and now it feels like a normality. It’s weird to say it, but it’s not my film anymore. Once you’ve made it and the final version goes out, it’s kind of everyone else’s film because everyone’s got their own perspective on it, or they read into things in their own way; they like it, or they hate it. It’s their film at that point, they own a piece of it in their own way, so it doesn’t feel like my film anymore.
“It’s nice to see people are enjoying it and seeing things in it that I didn’t see. It’s an honour to see people enjoy it because I care about the country (Laos) and the culture. I feel mostly proud that I was able to do them justice and let more people see their country.”