HELP YOURSELF: THE STORY

SUMMARY

As shells rain down on the Ukrainian city of Mariupol in the spring of 2022, David and Sarah Herd, an upper-middle class couple living in a quaint Dorset village, are having a crisis of conscience. They feel they just have to help. David, a professional cellist, and Sarah, a lawyer, decide to host a family of refugees.

But when The Rodchenko family arrive at their house a month later, the initial pleasantries are soon replaced by a pervading atmosphere of anxiety and paranoia as the Herds come to terms with the fact that The Rodchenkos are not quite who they expected and their presence in their home begins to expose deep fractures in David and Sarah’s relationship and parenting of their 13 year old son, Oscar. As David and Sarah navigate the minefield of communication breakdowns, cultural misunderstandings and overstepped boundaries, the couple begin to wonder whether their kind act of hosting a family from a warzone was really worth it, as their marriage comes under fire and their home becomes a battleground of its own. Help Yourself is a portrait of a family in crisis. It’s a tense study in family dynamics and cultural dissonance where repression and resentment scream silently in almost every scene.

STATEMENT

Help Yourself started when I was shooting a short film on a farm in Dorset. The farmer invited me to his house for a glass of wine and to try his prize-winning blueberries. We discussed many things. Farm life, village life, blueberries, and so on. But the thing that really caught my attention was a story he told me about a Ukrainian

family of refugees who had recently arrived in the village to be hosted by his

neighbour. I want to make a riveting suspense film; a claustrophobic family drama that is almost unbearable at times as the awkwardness of ‘civilised’ human behaviour is laid bare. I want to run the gamut of different shades of embarrassment, portraying social and personal uneasiness with a squirm-inducing accuracy, creating a simmering anxiety and lingering sense of paranoia throughout. I listened intently as he told me about all of the aches and pains his neighbour had experienced, but that the two families were working things through and trying to make a success of it. I wondered, “what would it be like for a family coming from a warzone, now living in a quintessential, picturesque British village?”. I’m interested in ordeal cinema; something I’ve explored in different ways in my three short films. I like to see what happens when people are tested to their psychological limits and I want to create films that put the audience right in the centre of these ordeals, living through them themselves. The ordeal in Help Yourself concerns a middle-class family whose entire belief system is under threat as their moral motivations are called into question, by themselves, by each other and by the audience. Over the course of the coming months, we began to hear what it was like from various newspaper and TV accounts. And, over the course of a year conducting over 100 interviews with Ukrainian and British families alike, I now have some understanding of what it’s really like. Help Yourself, at its core, is about when, who and how we decide to help. It’s about a British family, The Herds, who feel an impulse to help The Rodchenkos, a Ukrainian family fleeing from war in their hometown of Kharkiv. I want to dare our audience to dismiss these people as fundamentally different to themselves. But sat there in a dark auditorium, deep down, there may be an uncomfortable awareness that they are merely laughing at each other. But, though they may have lost almost everything, the Rodchenkos don’t need to be saved. They arrive as intelligent, loving, fully-functioning people. And as the narrative unfolds, we come to understand that, really, it’s the Herd family who need help.

The sum of all of these parts is to create a film that feels urgent, vital and an honest reflection of who we are in this country at this moment in time. I want to tell a universal story that is human to the core. A reminder that while helping is messy, difficult, and sometimes deeply uncomfortable, it remains the most human thing we can do.

Barnaby Blackburn