Itching

Filmmaker Biography: Cathy Marriott-Brown is a writer/director based in London. She has a background in audio, and an MA in Anthropology from Goldsmiths University, and is interested in films which use absurdity, humour, or surrealism to explore the human experience. She is a studio manager at AKTAPhotography, who provide accessibly priced headshots and showreels for actors, with the goal of creating a more equitable industry. She is currently working on several short film projects at various stages of development. 

Film Genesis: When I first heard about mudlarking I found it fascinating, as a really urban, and specifically London, form of archaeology. I was drawn to the power of these lost objects, so many of which would have been intimate possessions of long dead Londoners, and wondered what presence a person made out of them might have, as the sum of all this history. I’d had this visual image knocking around in my head for a while, when lockdown happened and I suddenly had all this time to write short films. When the lockdowns began to ease a couple of years later and I decided it was time to make one of them, Itching was the obvious choice.

I had met my DOP Sabina Claici on another short film, O, Glory, (shot on 35mm) and we have gone on to become good friends and repeated collaborators. She was the loader on that film and I was the boom operator. Sabina and Greg were, and still are, my key creative collaborators. Greg is my partner, and was the production designer on the film. I am yet to meet a more talented or highly skilled designer, and he understood the visual elements right from the start, creating some beautiful concept art of the bedroom set. Everything you can see in Itching was made, sourced, aged, or painted by Greg (with some help from set decorator Aphra Joly de Lotbiniere!), and Greg’s creation of the mudlark man is really, I think, the triumph of the film.