Gillian Wearing

Contemporary artist Gillian Wearing celebrates the legacy of Victorian novelist George Eliot. Just as Eliot’s novel Middlemarch explored the lives of ordinary men and women, this experimental film is made up of a diverse cast of people from different backgrounds.

In 2007, Gillian Wearing placed an advert – in newspapers, online, in job centres and elsewhere. It read: “Would you like to be in a film? You can play yourself or a fictional character. Call Gillian.” Of the hundreds of people who replied, seven – chosen through an extended process of auditions, interviews and workshops – ended up appearing in Self Made. Of those seven, five in particular use the acting technique known as Method to delve into their own memories, impulses, anxieties, fears, fantasies and inner resources to create a series of individual performance vignettes, their personal ‘end scenes’, that reveal with particular intensity and clarity who they really are deep down – or who, in another version of their lives, they might easily have been.

The film is a collection of one-minute short films created by 60 filmmakers from around the world on the theme of the death of cinema.

A mother and her twins talk about each other. The device of miming each others words, gives a disconcerting twist to the children's cruel honesty and their mother's unconditional adoration.

"Bully" documents an exercise in which a young man who has been bullied re-creates the experience with a group of participants. One takes on the young man's role while the others play the bullies or individuals who stood by, watching it happen instead of intervening.