Director Mark Jenkin in his Cornish folk horror film “Enys Men” – Cannes Studio

British director Mark Jenkin embraces films he can’t even rank, as he discovered while trying to popularize the directors’ two-day work. MenA psychedelic set on a remote island, Cornwall, near his home.

“We describe it as a ‘lost Cornish folk horror,’” he said when he stopped at Deadline Studio with star Mary Woodwine and producer Denzil Monk at the Cannes Film Festival, “but some marketing folks are pushing us away. He calls it “lost”. So let’s try to call it Cornish folk horror, and I’m also a little embarrassed to call it a horror movie because it’s not an obvious horror movie. So we’re stuck with the Cornish people, which doesn’t make sense. So we call it Cornell. This is a Cornish film. “

The story is simple, he explains. This is 1973. It’s about a woman who lives alone on a mostly uninhabited island in the Celtic Sea off the coast of Cornwall, and is there as a wildlife volunteer watching a rare flower growing in possibly contaminated soil. . Old abandoned mine around. The only thing she has for her company is an ancient stone that stands above the hut, on the hill where she lives, and that’s what gives the film its name. This title is from Cornwall: “Ennis” means island and “man” – pronounced “mane” means stone. So the English title is “Stone Island”.

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Unusually for the lockdown project, the shooting actually made the pandemic a little easier. “We were all ready to shoot in the early 2020s,” Monk said. So we moved for a year. And as soon as we started we shot for four weeks: one week with the interior and then three weeks with the moon and the very bare rocks of West Cornwall. “But since it was a pandemic where there are usually a lot of people and where tourists tend to congregate, we had a very clear space to create this uninhabited island.”

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For Woodwine, this extra space was a gift. “It was wonderful,” he says. “The feeling of isolation helped me a lot and the team was still very small; Obviously, he had no one from makeup to make sure he was perfect for every shot. So there was really a feeling of being quite isolated and alone and that introduced the character. [You think] It’s just for this job. But whatever happens, you realize that he has already been there before … “

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