A film by Jez Lewis
Producer: Rachel Wexler,
Editor: Miranda Watts, Executive Producer: Nick Broomfield, Composer: Roger McBrien
Reviews:
"This is sobering, determined, marvellous filmmaking." "...an example of British documentary filmmaking at its best..." "The most significant socially-motivated documentary I've seen... staggering, heartbreaking, and
needs to be seen across the UK."
Winner: Best UK First Feature, East End Film Festival, London 2010
* * * * * Nigel Andrews, Financial Times
"It's a heart-wrenching portrait of a community in crisis, which, you fear, might be equally applicable to numerous other disenfranchised generations elsewhere in both rural and urban Britain."
* * * * Wendy Ide, The Times
"A passionate and sometimes despairing documentary about drink- and drug-addiction in Hebden Bridge, Yorkshire."
* * * * Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian
"Most feature-length documentaries I watch are fascinating for the first half an hour then end up filling time for another 60 or so minutes. Not so this deeply moving, personal and important film about the picture postcard Pennine town of Hebden Bridge..."
* * * * Grant Rollings, The Sun
"...in its unpatronising directness it manages a hot wired emotionalism and sorrowful, worldly authenticity that Britain's filmic fiction-makers achieve only too rarely."
Trevor Johnston, Sight & Sound
"The tragedy of Lewis's sensitive and sensible film is that most of its subjects are as aware as us of the rut in which they are stuck."
* * * * Dave Calhoun, Time Out
"It is not usual for me to feel a combination of pain, compassion, sadness and anger. Then few films display such personal empathy as Jez Lewis's Shed Your Tears and Walk Away."
* * * * Jeff Sawtell, Morning Star
"Iain Duncan Smith...self-appointed physician to Breakdown Britain could usefully spend 90 minutes of his precious time watching Jez Lewis's new documentary film, Shed Your Tears and Walk Away."
Mary Dejevsky, The Independent
"his remarkably intimate doc is told with exceptional warmth, humanity and humour. A gripping ...report of the tragedy happening before our eyes that we'd normally try not to see."
* * * * Larushka Ivan-Zadeh, Metro
"While rough and ready, this is a documentary that makes us come to care very deeply for these lost souls..."
* * * * David Edwards, Daily Mirror
"...bold, deeply personal documentary filmmaking, providing an insight into the lives of lost souls that is both sympathetic
and urgent. An exceptional documentary."
Michael Hayden, London Film Festival 2009
Belfast Film Festival 2010
James Murray-White, freelance writer and reviewer