Dhillon Shukla’s money is a soft portrayal of love, friendship, and boyhood inside the town.
Below the grey of London’s iciness sky, a group of schoolboys throws pound coins at a playground wall. The sport is known as cash up, and the purpose is to get your currency closest to the wall. If you win, you have to toss the coin – and efficiently call it – to decide whether or no longer pocket the lot.
For lots, the sport is the embodiment of mundanity: a faculty backyard pastime played to skip the time. However, for writer and director Dhillon Shukla, it’s a candy nostalgia that’s at the coronary heart of his short movie, cash up – a gentle portrayal of affection, friendship, and boyhood in London.
The movie follows thirteen-12 months-antique Reece (portrayed with the aid of alan Asaad) at some point of his day, as he hustles to scrape collectively enough money to shop for the female of his dreams dinner on their after-college date. Viewers journey with the youngster as he charms his local shopkeeper receives entrepreneurial at school, and – subsequently – receives his happy finishing.
“I was trying to show a lighter facet of the town and young multicultural Londoners,” Shukla says of the film’s intention. “when we see youngsters like these on film, we’re used to seeing them being caught up in testimonies that center around drugs and violence.
That happens, but it’s additionally real to have films that display the light as well as the darkish, and I desired to stability that out.”
It’s inside the boys’ banal, everyday experiences that we see the resilience, spirit, and pleasure of coming of age in the metropolis and learning approximately existence, love, and tough paintings.
Cash up is released as part of new creatives, supported through arts council England and BBC Arts, and in collaboration with the ICA and dazed. It follows Samuel Doubek’s stonewall 2069 and dubheasa lanipekun’s blue corridor in the assignment. Forged photos for cash up had been shot through photographer grey brame.
Underneath, Dhillon Shukla discusses how to cash up came to fruition and reflects on how his revel in developing up in London inspired the movie.
What stimulated money up?
Dhillon Shukla: it becomes truly inspired by growing up in London and my time in secondary school. I’d been operating on a more extended script that’s set within the future and pretty big in scale for a while and wanted to do something small and modern-day. So in a few approaches, it got here as a response to that.