Kosar Ali was in school in Stratford, east London, on the afternoon of March 9 when her phone, she says, suddenly started to “blow up” with alerts, right in the middle of psychology class. Confused, the 17-year-old asked for permission to step outside. She scanned through the messages and absorbed two vital pieces of information. One, that it was Bafta nominations day (she had forgotten) and, two, that her film, the locally shot teenage drama Rocks, had amassed a commanding seven nominations, making it the most lauded title of the year along with Nomadland, ahead of the lavish Hollywood biography Mank (six nominations) and the Ralph Fiennes period weepy The Dig (five).
Ali was nominated in the best supporting actress category, up against the stars of the established studio vehicles Borat Subsequent Moviefilm and Judas and the Black Messiah. Ali, who had never considered acting before Rocks — she’s a modest student from a Somali-British who loves to paint and whose two siblings are doctors — held out her phone and said: “Damn! This is crazy!”
Everything about Rocks is crazy. As a film, it shouldn’t work. A bunch of teenage non-professional actors thrown together on set for seven weeks with a couple of cameras, the director of Suffragette (Sarah Gavron) and an improvisational script about being a big sister? And yet what results is a vibrant and utterly original account of female friendship, family bonds and the personal cost of facing responsibilities before your time.
Rocks follows the Hackney schoolgirls and best friends Sumaya (Ali) and Rocks (Bukky Bakray), whose easygoing days of classroom banter are rudely interrupted when the depressed mother of Rocks disappears, leaving her daughter alone with little money and in charge of her younger brother, Emmanuel (D’angelou Osei Kissiedu). What follows is a peripatetic odyssey that pings our heroine around the city, mostly east London (although there’s a brief diversion to Hastings on the East Sussex coast), in an attempt to dodge the clutches of social services, while she continues to maintain the veneer of a “normal” life.
The power of the film is built into its intimacy, and the sense that we are eavesdropping on the lives of these girls who exist unselfconsciously in front of a camera that is often shaking, or moving, or casually snatching moments, as if spontaneously. The trick, however, and the reason that Rocks has become a heavyweight awards contender, is that everything you see on screen, every throwaway moment, is rigorously planned and unashamedly deliberate.
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Two years of pre-production and script development helped. The film began as an idea that Gavron, 50, had in 2015 while promoting her star-studded historical drama Suffragette, featuring Meryl Streep and Carey Mulligan, and taking it into schools in the hope of inspiring teenage girls. She decided that her next project would be a movie about “what it is to be a teenage girl, right now”. There was no story, and no plot. Just a concept about capturing the essence of female friendship. In 2016 she joined forces with the associate director Anuradha Henriques and the playwright and debut screenwriter Theresa Ikoko and they began a talent trawl through the schools and youth clubs of Hackney and Newham, hosting workshops with students, listening to their stories, searching for inspiration and eventually whittling down more than 1,300 girls to 30 stalwarts.
There was still no narrative but at least they knew the film they did not want to make. “A lot of films centred around teenage girlhood tend to be about boys, or the first sexual experience that girls have with boys,” Henriques says. “And we didn’t want that because it didn’t reflect the conversations we were having with the girls.”
Neither would they be making a Top Boy knock-off, with knife crime and shootouts on the mean streets of Hackney. “I was born and raised in Hackney and I love Hackney,” says Ikoko, whose award-winning play Girls was inspired by the Boko Haram schoolgirl kidnappings. “And I know that it’s either portrayed as completely gentrified or a place of danger. But a lot of us in the middle, who’ve been here a long time, can appreciate what Hackney has given to us, and want to give it back.”
More workshops followed in 2017, this time in Islington. Mood boards filled the walls. The 30 chosen girls brought ideas and character nuance to the table. Ali’s Sumaya, for instance, became, like Ali, Somalian-British, with an interest in painting and a close, loving family. They gave notes too, about their favourite music, personal experiences and views on race and identity in the UK today. But still no story. Until, that is, Ikoko walked in one day, in early summer, and revealed that she had been working on her own screenplay too, a love letter to her older sister, Tracy, who had taken care of her when she was a child. “I had been working on that idea for a year,” Ikoko says. “But then I realised that we were driving towards the same thing. The film that I’d been cultivating outside the group would be better served within it.”
The moment, Gavron says, was a turning point. They put the script up on the wall, broke it down into story beats and asked the cast members for notes and input before Ikoko disappeared for four months, together with her co-writer, Claire Wilson, and bashed out the finished screenplay.
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Meanwhile, funding was secured (the budget is roughly £3 million) and the film was eventually shot over seven weeks in the summer of 2018 with a streamlined central cast, down from 30 to 6 key players (as Rocks and her five friends) who represent the rich diversity of Hackney — their backgrounds are from Nigeria, Poland, Somalia, Bangladesh, England and Ghana.
The production, Gavron says, was busy but relaxed, and constructed around the inexperience of the non-professional cast. It was shot, thus, in chronological order (a rarity these days), with two cameras constantly running (to avoid the need for repetition) and with the talent encouraged, wherever possible, to deviate from the screenplay and elevate the realism. Ali, for instance, rearranged the choreography of a pivotal art room sequence because she felt that Gavron’s original idea of students sitting attentively was too stiff. “She just said to me, ‘I wouldn’t sit here, I’d be walking around, and someone would come up to me instead,’ ” Gavron says. “And she knew best. We were taking our cue from them all the time.”
The filming ended in late September 2018, with Gavron and the editor, Maya Maffioli, faced with the daunting task of cutting together 150 hours of footage (almost three times the usual amount of feature material). The editing process, perhaps unsurprisingly, lasted until April 2019, with Maffioli’s “greatest gift”, according to Henriques, being the creation of a new ending that’s completely different (no spoilers here) from the zany heist movie finale that Ikoko had written. “They invited me in to see the new ending,” Ikoko says. “I intended to be polite, and to humour them, and then to say, ‘No! No way!’ But when I watched it I got goosebumps. It was more authentic than the ending we had written.”
Up until this point Rocks had been an interesting idea and a thrilling project, Gavron says. It was a film for the communities in Hackney that had contributed to it, and for the girls and their families who had made it possible. But then it had its premiere at the Toronto Film Festival in September 2019 and it was adored, with audiences and critics alike falling for the energising milieu and the winning figure of Rocks, whose struggles for normality and acceptance are eminently sympathetic. “We were at a matinee screening in Toronto and I looked around over the sea of grey hair,” Gavron says. “And they loved it. Which was when Theresa turned to me and said, ‘Wow. Those girls from Hackney are translating over here too?’ ”
Awards season contention has inevitably followed, although Gavron, who is up against the Nomadland film-maker Chloé Zhao in the best director Bafta category, isn’t entirely comfortable with solo recognition for such a collaborative effort. “I want to acknowledge the truth about how you create a film like this,” Gavron says. “Chloé Zhao wrote, directed and she even edited Nomadland. That’s a very very different thing to this. What we have here is so many voices, and the film works precisely because of those voices.”
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Everyone involved with Rocks, including the young cast, is already looking at future projects. Ali has a “highly confidential” project coming up that she can’t discuss, while Ikoko is working for BBC3 and Gavron is contemplating another collaborative effort. Yet it’s the impact and the wider significance of the movie that’s the focus of all the attention. Gavron says that she hopes the idea of diverse, localised storytelling will proliferate post-Rocks and will help to expand the industry to even broader audiences, whereas Ikoko’s ambitions for the film are more specific. She hopes that it will encourage producers to stop underestimating the cinemagoing public by presuming that small, seemingly esoteric films about “black and brown girls” won’t connect with white audiences.
“I think about all the TV shows that I love, that are white,” Ikoko says. “I love Catastrophe. I cried when I watched Shameless. I have all kinds of connections to these stories. So if I can, surely others can too. I think the success of Rocks is a reminder that the audience, primarily, cares. People just care about other people. If you give an audience something to care about, they will.”
Rocks is on Netflix
The Baftas start tonight at 8pm on BBC2; the main awards ceremony is tomorrow at 7pm on BBC1
