507

A woman wakes up in some ‘white space’ without any understanding of where she is or why she’s there, only to find out that she’s part of a testing programme which is currently running test 507.

Eve (Tapako-Brown) has no idea where she is. She has woken up in a liminal space where everything is white and where there appears to be no borders or limits. There’s no furniture or anything else in the space with her and immediately she starts calling out for anyone who might hear her. As she turns to take in her surroundings, and the camera pans around her, we see Adam (Davis) emerge in the background, donned in a nice wool suit as compared to Eve’s bright blue scrubs, marking him out as some sort of administrator for the test at hand.

As the two talk, we get to find out some background information as to why Eve is there in the first place. Adam is somehow able to conjure up a couple of sofas to sit on and he encourages Eve to join him there in some sort of therapy session, where she may just find out the truth of her situation. He tells her that in the real world there was some sort of virus that appeared, inhabiting people’s bodies before mimicking their vital functions and taking them over completely. The only things the virus couldn’t replicate were people’s memories, and so Adam asks Eve to try and recount her memories as best she can in order to discount her as a virus carrying entity.

There is, however, more to Adam and Eve’s story than he’s letting on from the start, and as the two try to recover some of Eve’s more resonant memories, we find out more of the reasoning as to why she has found herself the subject of all this testing. As Adam comes out of the testing space and talks to someone on the phone, the scope of the project, and the film, suddenly becomes a lot bigger, and we begin to wonder just what is driving Adam on and why he has not given up on Eve even after 506 previously failed tests.

This short film, 507, comes to us from the Metfilm Summer School in Birmingham, where four overseas students between the ages of fifteen and seventeen were brought together with a camera for the first time to see if a future in filmmaking might appeal to them. 507 came about through a process of collaboration between these four students, as they were given courses on the basics of filmmaking before being asked to create something of their own. From concept to completion the whole of 507 was created within the space of ten days, with course leader Liam D. Millard always being close at hand to offer support, guidance, or a little bit of technical expertise here or there, to ensure that the creative ideas were expressed and achieved as close to the students’ visions as possible.

As such, the concepts explored in 507 are fairly basic and at times a little muddled, as the creative ideas from each team member are wedged together to give everyone equal expression in the film. The locations, too, are necessarily basic and mostly empty, highlighting the limiting factors involved in such an amateur project. In the end, one of the main ideas of the film gets dropped and is never mentioned again as the narrative moves into different spaces. The transitions between these spaces are also a little clunky at times, as the team grapples with the technical aspects of filmmaking which they had only been introduced to around a week earlier. Overall though, the film does hold together pretty well, and at least aims for a deep, affecting storyline, which is designed to bring the viewer into the scenario.

For the fact that 507 was made in ten days by teenage amateurs who had never been behind a camera before, it is a remarkable achievement in filmmaking. The eighteen-minute runtime has no filler, even if the narrative forgets itself a little, and everything holds together all the way through to the end. Whatever technical courses they’re teaching at Metfilm Birmingham, they really get the best out of the students and show an incredible amount of progress in such a short amount of time. From the camerawork, to the editing, to the direction of the actors, of which Stefan Davis is a real standout in terms of his performance, the four new filmmakers put everything they have learned into practice and come out with something they should all be proud of. 507 is not perfect, but if the students at Metfilm can learn so much in so little time, who knows what they might be capable of given the benefit of some full-time teaching.