Background

In June 2000, British custom officials at the port of Dover stopped a container truck in a routine check. Inside, they discovered sixty people – illegal immigrants from China. Two of them were alive; the other fifty-eight, dead. The truck driver, afraid of discovery, had closed all the hatches on the container. During the ferry crossing, the people had suffocated to death. The discovery made headline news and highlighted the scale, and tragedy, of people smuggling in the UK.

A few months later, Steve Hudson visited the fishing port of Fraserburgh in northeast Scotland. The town has lived from fishing for hundreds of years. Now, with catches declining, quotas increasing, and fishing grounds opened to international fleets, the Scottish fishing industry is being decimated. In the space the following two years, Fraserburgh lost half its fleet – over 100 ships. Whilst a few big ships still prosper, families who have been fishing for generations are being forced out of business.

It was out of these two separate incidents that True North was born. The simple premise: What if fishermen ended up trying to bring people over to Britain? “There have been some interesting films told from the immigrants’ point of view” Hudson acknowledges “but what I was interested in, though, were the people smugglers. At the time, government ministers were raging against them – they needed someone to blame for illegal immigration and the smugglers fit the bill. On the face of it though, people smuggling is a victimless crime. It just didn’t seem enough to say that all people smugglers were evil monsters and leave it at that.”

Over the next months, research for the film took Hudson from illegal gambling dens in London's Chinatown to the decks of trawlers out on the North Sea. “In the end, I was asking myself if there’s really such a difference between these two worlds. Whether fishermen or immigrants, most of the time I found myself talking to good people who were simply trying to make a living.”

For both groups, though, the numbers are against them. Trawler skippers find themselves forced to decommission their boats in order to repay bank loans. The ships are scrapped, the crews sacked. Meanwhile, illegal Chinese immigrants take out $20,000 loans to pay for the journey to the UK. The only way they can ever repay the debt is to get to the West and get a job, however badly-paid. If they default, they’re liable to be kidnapped and tortured. Under these circumstances, people are prepared to undergo almost any mistreatment to avoid capture by the authorities.

Production

“I’d always wanted to do a film on a working boat” Hudson says. “Below decks, it’s so incredibly claustrophobic: men live together in just a few square feet of space, surrounded by the constant din of the engine. Above decks, it’s the opposite: you’re exposed to nature and the elements in a way that we have completely forgotten on land.” For the young writer-director, there was no alternative: to capture the unique atmosphere of a real boat, the shoot had to happen on a genuine trawler.

The conventional wisdom, however, was quite the opposite. “We had a great producer lined up who was very interested, but who wanted to do the whole film in a water tank and then add in the sea digitally.” Hudson stuck to his guns, though, and the exterior scenes were shot in Ireland and Scotland in the early months 2006, on board the trawler Martha David. In a sad parallel to the script, the skipper was being forced to sell up after a lifetime in fishing.

“The shoot itself was pretty exhausting” Hudson acknowledges. “Filming out at sea in gale force winds on the open deck of a trawler in the middle of winter . . . well, it’s not the easiest thing in the world.” The team’s efforts, however, paid off handsomely, and the film has a gritty authenticity that a tank shoot could never have matched.

Hudson also feels the results vindicates his efforts. “The film has that feeling of reality” he says. “The deck of an old ship is so worn and everything on it is so specific – even the rust and the way a door has been painted over five times. There’s something intangible, the spirit of the thing, which we wouldn’t have got if we’d built the set from scratch. Filming at sea was appalling difficult, but that difficulty seems to transmit onto the screen, that sense that it is a real ship. These are things that money just can’t buy."

Premiere

Whilst still in post-production, True North was invited to screen the Discovery section of the Toronto International Film Festival. The world premiere will now take place on Monday 11th September. “We’re absolutely delighted” says producer Sonja Ewers. “It’s always been our goal to screen at Toronto, and we’re really looking forward to finally sharing the film with audiences there. A huge amount of passion and commitment has gone into True North, and we’re very confident that this is something that audiences in Toronto and around the world will respond to very enthusiastically.”