Photographing Fairies (1997)

In 1917, two young girls in the village of Cottingley in Yorkshire produced five photographs that appeared to show fairies.

Arthur Conan Doyle, who had recently lost his son in the war and was deep in the spiritualist movement that consumed so many grieving British families in those years, declared them genuine. The photographs were cut-out illustrations from a children's book, propped up with hat pins. The girls admitted this publicly in 1983, in their eighties.

In 1997, two separate films were released about the Cottingley Fairies. One was a warmly lit children's film with Harvey Keitel playing Conan Doyle. The other was PHOTOGRAPHING FAIRIES, which is not a children's film by any definition and which has almost nothing in common with the first beyond the historical premise.

Adapted by director Nick Willing from Steve Szilagyi's 1992 novel, the film stars Toby Stephens as a post-war photographer still destroyed by the death of his wife, who encounters a photograph that may genuinely show fairies and travels to the rural English village where it was taken.

The script went through twenty-three drafts. The fairies themselves were created by Ron Mueck, then still largely unknown, who would go on to become one of the most significant sculptors working today, famous for his hyperrealistic large-scale human figures. His fairies are strange and unsettling in exactly the right way, nothing like the Victorian illustrations they were pretending to debunk.

The film's central conceit, that a rare flower slows human perception enough to see creatures that normally move too fast for the naked eye, is treated with the same seriousness as the grief and post-war spiritual hunger that surround it. Ben Kingsley plays the vicar with characteristic intensity. The screenplay attempts, among other things, to engage with why an entire generation of rational people so desperately wanted the photographs to be real.

It was Nick Willing's feature debut. It won the Méliès d'Or at the European Fantasy Film Festival.