Helen

Helen is a 2008 drama feature length film by Desperate Optimists, (Joe Lawlor and Christine Molloy), and was the first feature film made through their production company Desperate Optimists Production and the first project Fonic worked with Lawlor and Molloy on, providing full post production audio.

Helen is an ambitious film that looks at ideas of ‘growing up, growing away and entering the world, of awareness of selfhood and community, of fate and identity, of change, loss and recovery.’ (The Guardian)

Helen is a lonely teenager in care with a strong resemblance to a popular and well-off girl at her school who has gone missing – and perhaps been murdered. Helen is persuaded to ‘play’ Joy in a police reconstruction for a Crimewatch-type television show. Helen luxuriates in wearing the girl’s expensive jacket and conceives a fascination for Joy’s happy and comfortable family background – a loving family, a boyfriend and a bright future. Helen by contrast is parent-less and has been living in institutions all her life and has never been close to anyone. In addition Joy’s distraught parents welcome Helen into their life, offering to coach her for exams, all too clearly as a distraction from the loss of the daughter. Overtime, as she get’s comfortable in the missing girl’s identity Helen is made to confront her own troubled past.

Helen played in over 50 film festivals and was distributed across the UK in 2009 by New Wave