Across A Lake Below The Hill - Memories Of The Lakes School 1965-2015

This film is a collaboration between a group of disparate individuals with one thing in common - they were all educated at The Lakes School, Windermere. Around a hundred pupils, past and present, were involved in the writing, performing and production.
Memories? Too many, but I suppose one stands out…
I was thirteen years old when the art master, Mr Yardley, asked me if I would like to help on the latest Ciné Club production. I had no idea there even was a school Ciné Club. Membership was strictly by invitation only.
The club’s films, written, produced and financed by Mr Yardley, were largely slapstick comedies (he loved Old Mother Riley and Laurel & Hardy movies), and were always shot on location, during camping weekends at Dent Head viaduct.
These fifteen minute, super 8 epics could be years in the making. It’s hard to imagine, in a world where mobile phones can shoot, edit and upload feature length movies with a couple of clicks, but these precious three minute film cartridges recorded picture only, and had to be sent away for several weeks to be processed. Editing the tiny strips of film was a laborious and nerve wracking process, completed over hundreds of half hour lunchtime sessions. No wonder that Mr Yardley’s young actors had often passed into puberty, passed their A levels and were swigging pints in the students unions of the UK before the films were finished.
So it was that I found myself in the art room one evening after school, standing in front of a cassette recorder, repeatedly attempting to sync my voice with the projected image of a boy I had never met, who had long since left school. This was my first brush with the magic of cinema.
From this inauspicious start, I went on to make another two Ciné Club films. By the third attempt, myself and three friends - Mike Nicholson, Sean Emery & Alan Miller - were given carte blanche to write, produce, shoot and edit our own little masterpiece; always under the watchful eye of David Yardley who, like so many of my teachers in the 1970s, gave up his own time to help students develop interests that weren’t part of the curriculum.
Fast forward forty years and I am still making films. After a Masters Degree in Film from the Royal College of Art, I started directing professionally in 1988. This career has taken me around the world, won me awards and allowed me to work with some incredibly talented actors, writers and film crews.
Across A Lake, Below The Hill is dedicated to the amazing teachers who helped me on my way, and to the friends that I made at The Lakes School, who have been with me all my life.
Michael Cumming. October 2015.
Director Michael Cumming made his first films in The Lakes School Cine Club in the 1970's. His work on groundbreaking comedies, such as Brass Eye and Toast Of London have won critical acclaim and continue to win awards, both internationally and in Britain.