Andrew Hull - Film Career

Film Career

While working as an architect in Paris in 1991, Andrew Hull was invited to Germany by Carleton University colleagues Stephen Kovats and Ian Johnston to work on video and animation projects and to mentor students of the Bauhaus Dessau's international and multi-disciplinary 'Experimental Studio Dessau North'. In 1992 he was co-commissioned by the 'Werkstatt Industrielles Gartenreich' of the Bauhaus Dessau Foundation to make a documentary video about the 'Kulturpalast Bitterfeld', a Socialist Utopian model project of the German Democratic Republic, built in 1954. His collaborator in this video project was Stephen Kovats, media researcher, architect and artistic director of Transmediale. The film was entitled “Pay No Attention to the Man Behind the Curtain”. As a result of this collaboration, Hull moved to Germany, living first in Dessau, later in Berlin. He made films during this period and taught at the Bauhaus Dessau in the newly created Electronic Media Interpretation Studio. Hull's films from this time explored the genres of horror and comedy, the real and the fictional; they also documented and questioned the strained political and social transformations taking place in Germany after the fall of the Berlin Wall. In Dessau he made “Earworm”, a forty-three minute film funded by both German and Canadian Arts Councils that told the story of a group of anarchist Karaoke enthusiasts gripped by a mysterious virus that causes an addiction to techno music and a taste for sucking the inner ear out of unsuspecting victims. The film could be read as a metaphor and biting satire on the paranoia of communist era East Germany, intertwined with the politics around HIV/AIDS, and the growing gay underground club and rave scene in Germany in the late eighties and early nineties. Hull also presented the video installation “Berlin Alexanderplatz” at the Ostranenie International Video Festival at the Bauhaus Dessau.

In 1996 Andrew Hull returned to Canada and lived in Toronto until 2008. While working as an Art Director in the Canadian/US Film and Television industry, he wrote and directed several of his own short films. “Dizzy” (Winner of Best Short at the Long Island Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 2003) and “That Thing We Do” (Winner of Best Short at the Tampa International Gay and Lesbian Film Festival in 2004) were made with assistance from the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council and were coming-of-age stories directly based on his own experiences and diaristic writings. In 2003, Hull was one of eight students invited to enter the Director's Program at the Norman Jewison created Canadian Film Centre (CFC), Canada's foremost school for advanced training in film, television and new media. He graduated in 2004 with the short film “Squeezebox”, a tragicomedy starring Canadian cult rock heroine, actress and singer-songwriter Mary Margaret O'Hara. The film is the story of a teen accordion prodigy who struggles to reunite the family band after his father's suicide. “Rewind”, a five minute film made shortly after Hull's graduation from the Canadian Film Centre, paid homage to film noir and was loosely based on Martin Amis' book “Time's Arrow”. All of Hull's films from this period went on to tour at film festivals around the globe.

In 2008 Andrew re-located to London UK to be with his life partner, contemporary artist and painter, Shaan Syed, and to begin production on his first feature film, “Siren”, co-written with Canadian-born, US-based screenwriter Geoffrey Gunn. "Siren", a horror / thriller genre film is an allegory on the Greek myth of the siren, and tells the tale of three friends whose lives are forever changed when they stop to rescue a beautiful young woman on a remote island. The film was produced by UK-based Poisson Rouge Pictures and was shot in Tunisia during the summer of 2009. The film's soundtrack features and is based on the Los Angeles all-girl group Warpaint's song, "Elephants". It premiered on November 11, 2010 at Abertoir Film Festival in Wales, UK to critical acclaim and was subsequently bought by Lionsgate to be released to DVD in March 2011.