About the film

Bait is a film so original it defies classification. Shot entirely on grainy black and white 16mm with a hand-cranked Bolex, and processed manually, Mark Jenkin’s BAFTA-winning debut feature feels timeless. Struggling fisherman Martin (Edward Rowe) ekes out a living selling door-to-door fish and lobster on the Cornish coast of the Atlantic. Having renounced his childhood home to a bourgeois out-of-towner family, he lives a brooding and disgruntled existence in flickering chiaroscuro. Without even a boat to his name, Martin finds himself increasingly precarious. All he wants is a humble and traditional life by the shore, but the waves of gentrification, tourism, and Airbnb sharks have swept him into troubled waters. As the social tensions mount inevitably, something has got to give. Anchored by its singular artistic vision, Bait is an impassioned tale of class war threaded into a mesmerizing and dreamlike artisanal style. —Dan Boos

About the filmmaker

Described by critic Mark Kermode as ”a visually stunning and formally adventurous swirl of pure cinema." Mark’s previous film Bronco’s House was his first foray into hand-processed celluloid narrative filmmaking. The film screened at festivals worldwide and was a finalist at the Chicago Blow Up Festival. His handmade short film works have been promoted by the British Council since 2016 with The Road to Zennor being awarded the Best Experimental Film prize at the London Short Film Festival in 2017, and The Essential Cornishman being given an Honourable Mention at the Berlin Experimental Film Festival the same year. Mark is currently developing a biopic of St. Ives painter (and his great-great-great grandfather) Alfred Wallis. He is an associate of Falmouth University where he lectures Film, is the author of the Silent Landscape Dancing Grain 13 Film Manifesto and is a member of The Newlyn Society of Artists.