Ollie Gardner and Jake Harvey come to Edinburgh, Callum Scott Howells and Samuel Bottomley in tow, with a Pippa Cross-backed movie about the unspoken intimacy of male friendship: "We [need to] start showing young men that you can love another man and it can be platonic and a really beautiful thing."
Ollie Gardner and Jake Harvey are not afraid to say they love each other.
The two British filmmakers — about to make their feature-length debut with Edinburgh Film Festival’s competition title The State of Us, premiering Friday — are flipping the narrative on what it means to be a man and embracing the intimacy of male friendships.
“Masculinity and toxic masculinity are synonymous with each other now. I’m not sure there is such a thing as positive masculinity,” Gardner wonders to The Hollywood Reporter ahead of their big night in the Scottish capital. “Especially in the public discourse and what young boys are being fed on social media, everything around the manosphere. We’ve had amazing pieces like Adolescence… What we were trying to do in this film is show, okay, well, what’s next? What do we do now?”
After meeting through the admittedly “macho” world of university rugby, Gardner, now 29, and Harvey, 28, peeled off and pursued their love of the arts in parallel industries: Gardner in theater and Harvey in TV. Under the wing of British producer Pippa Cross, who had seen a couple of their short films, they have — in their words — begged, borrowed and stolen to make this movie, and now arrive in Edinburgh with one of the U.K.’s most stirring indie films of the year, anchored by two devastatingly tender performances from Callum Scott Howells (It’s a Sin) and Samuel Bottomley (California Schemin’).
