_{Silver Haze by Sacha Polak}

Silver Haze (a premiere in the Berlin Film Festival’s Panorama) marks the second collaboration between Dutch director Sacha Polak and British star, Vicky Knight. They also worked together on 2019’s Dirty God** which screened in Sundance and opened the International Film Festival Rotterdam.

In the new film, Knight plays Franky, a nurse in an east London hospital who falls in love with one of her patients, the beautiful and impulsive Florence (Esmé Creed-Miles). Franky is still traumatised and bitter over a fire 15 years before in which she was badly burned - and which has had a devastating effect on her family.

“Vicky and me, we travelled so much with Dirty God. I enjoyed working with her so much. I thought she was such a good actress that out of that came her wish and my wish to work together again,” Polak explains the origins of their second film together.

Both films are fictional but draw on elements of Knight’s actual experiences. She is a burns survivor who, in 2003, was caught in a horrific fire in a London pub. “I think also, because of her scars, she [Knight] was a bit afraid nobody would work with her. I thought immediately, no, we can make another feature.”

Polak is a very experienced filmmaker. She is currently in Dublin, directing the 19th Century-set thriller series The Doll Factory for Paramount+. Her previous credits include both international projects like Amazon TV series Hanna (also starring Esmé Creed-Miles) and Dutch arthouse pictures such as her debut Hemel* (2012). Talking about Vicky Knight, though, the director makes it very clear that Knight is one of the best actors she has ever worked with.

“First of all, I think she is very, very natural in front of the camera. She is funny. She has good timing. She has great presence. Indeed, I think she has a natural beauty - so I just think she is very interesting to look at,” Polak reflects. ”I just felt I wanted to give her another opportunity to show what she can do.”

Knight, she adds, also excels at improvisation - and much of Silver Haze was filmed on the hoof. Polak’s original screenplay consisted only of a 20-page outline. “Not long before we started shooting, I thought, oh no, people actually need a script because nobody knows what we are doing. I wrote a script really quickly and then, based on that script, we improvised.”

One scene, in which Florence and Franky are harassed by young homophobic males on top of a bus, was inspired by a real-life incident in 2019 in which teenagers abused a lesbian couple on the top deck of a London bus.

The director remembers how, during the making of Dirty God, Knight would become upset and self-conscious even when her hands (badly scarred from the fire) were filmed. “This time [on Silver Haze], she was so strong, she was so enjoying it… I think she was even enjoying it more than shooting Dirty God. I hope it was cathartic… [and] I think it was good that we shot it with her real sister and her real brother in the place where she grew up.”

If you didn’t know better, watching Silver Haze you could be forgiven for assuming that Polak was an indigenous British filmmaker who’d grown up in the country. She seems to know British culture inside out. Silver Haze was shot in East London and in Southend-on-Sea.

So does Polak now feel like a naturalised Brit? She parries the question. She does admit, though, that she now understands British irony and understatement. “If a British person says ‘thank you very much, it means ‘f**k you,’” she shares one piece of local wisdom she has learned, namely not always trust compliments. “But knowing Vicky so well, knowing her family so well, I do know that environment. I’ve spent so much time with her and I’ve spent so much time in England that it doesn’t feel foreign to me to make this film.”

Silver Haze was produced by Marleen Slot at Viking Film. It had many of the same partners as Dirty God, among them EMU Films and BBC Film in the UK, and New Europe Film Sales is handling the international distribution. The film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund and Film Production Incentive.
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*Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund
**Film is supported by the Netherlands Film Fund and Film Production Incentive