Blue Jean

Georgia Oakley's first feature premiered in Venice's Giornate degli Autori in 2022 and won the audience award there, then swept a run of British Independent Film Awards including Best Lead Performance for Rosy McEwen. It was made for very little money in the north-east of England, and it is the rare period piece whose period is inside living memory for most of its audience.

Jean teaches physical education at a Newcastle comprehensive in 1988. At school she is a competent, slightly remote woman in a tracksuit. In the evenings she drives to a bar where she is somebody else entirely, and where her girlfriend Viv, played by Kerrie Hayes, has no patience for the arrangement. Section 28 is going through Parliament — the clause banning local authorities from promoting homosexuality — and Jean is not a campaigner, which is precisely Oakley's interest. Then a new girl in her class walks into the bar. Victor Seguin shot it on grainy 16mm in a palette of chlorine blues.

McEwen's performance works almost entirely in what Jean withholds, and critics singled out its refusal of the redemptive arc that British films about this era usually reach for. The film's argument is quieter and harder: that a law does most of its work not through prosecutions but through the small daily calculations of people who would rather keep their jobs.