The Empty Plan

Trail of the Spider transposes Western genre motifs and the suppressed racial history of the American west (where one in three cowboys were black or Mexican) onto the transforming landscape of East London. Questioning and re-imagining the Western’s portrayal of the “Vanishing Frontier” , the film extends the metaphor to the material and psychological conditions of a present day city increasingly dominated by volatile financial speculations and private interests.

Set in the wake of Britain’s first financial crisis, the South Sea Bubble of 1720, and based on the inferred prison encounters between the thief Jack Sheppard and the writer Daniel Defoe, this critical costume drama traces connections between fiction, speculation and aesthetics.