Iris Law

In rainy, nocturnal London, photographer Miles obsessively captures unforgiving, morbid portraits of oblivious strangers. When not selling them, he shares them online as 'Rain Catcher'. But soon he notices something unsettling: a mysterious woman watching him and photographing him—turning the lens back on Miles. As her gaze closes in, his world fractures—his work is sabotaged, his name defamed, his loved ones endangered. Consumed by paranoia, he spirals into a dark, delirious obsession to uncover the truth behind her motives. Based on the 2018 short film of the same name.

Do you look back on the optimism of the 1997-2001 era as a lost golden age, or do you see it as a period of naïvety, delusion and folly? There’s a lot of nostalgia for the nineties at the moment, especially from people too young to remember it who see the decade as a simpler, pre-internet time. Modern nostalgia often draws on corporate American-90s mall culture, but what about British culture? With I’ve Been Trying To Tell You – made to accompany the Saint Etienne album of the same name – director Alasdair McLellan evokes the era through the fog of memory. The resulting film, shot in locations from Grangemouth to Portmeirion to Southampton, is both beautiful and enveloping.

The story of a band of spotty, noisy, working-class kids with “no future,” who shook the boring, corrupt Establishment to its core, threatened to bring down the government and changed music and culture forever.