TYPIST ARTIST PIRATE KING

… The finished work gives a sense of what it might have been like to spend time in Amiss’s company: it is warm, funny, chaotic, and a little frustrating. Cantankerous Audrey hoodwinks her frazzled care-worker Sandra – a woman who has never driven on the motorway – into chauffeuring her the 300-odd miles to Sunderland in a tiny yellow Nissan Leaf via A-roads and country lanes, setting the stage for a scrappy and occasionally surreal road movie …

… Beautifully lit and shot by DoP Agnès Godard, the film is as much a love song to Amiss as to the North of England. Here is Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North; here the windswept beaches of Roker and Seaburn. … Lingering shots take in Amiss’s paintings and sketches, as well as the scrapbooks of sweet wrappers that constituted her ‘avant-garde phase’.

… It’s up to the viewers to discern if Audrey has staunch memories or elusive fabrications, in the way that an art gallery might challenge perception and thinking. From the moment the audience is introduced to Audrey’s flat and frantic daily routines, they’re invited to be challenged. Not only are ideas surrounding mental health and the care available for it confronted head-on, but the meandering and often chaotic pacing of the film is an acquired taste – like a bemused mother wandering around an avant-garde installation, pretending to know what she’s talking about. …

Film Facts

• The film is a fictionalised portrait of the late “avant-garde and misunderstood” artist Audrey Amiss.
• Carol Morley, the film’s Director, was granted a Wellcome Institute Screenwriting Fellowship in 2015 where she found the archival collection of Audrey Amiss. Inspired by her diaries, letters and art the film weaves real events into an imagined road-trip.
• The title of the film derives from Amiss’s passport, where she listed her occupation as: ‘typist artist pirate king’.