Grants & Awards

About the Film:

Recently the community in the South Bronx pasted photographs of themselves ‘wearing’ women’s eyes in a bid to see the world through a mother’s perspective. Two months after the revolution in Tunisia, a group of photographers replaced the dictator’s public photographs with a mosaic of Tunisian faces. All this and much more is happening under the ever increasing umbrella of a truly global art initiative called ‘Inside Out’, inspired by the French artist JR. This film follows that project.

The Inside Out project has become an incredible platform by which people publicly paste an image of themselves in the name of something for which they stand. Set within a global conversation about the modern relevance of image, the film follows regular people becoming artists and witnesses the transformative power of making artistic statements.

Combining JR’s visually breathtaking method of pasting black and white photographs of strong faces in the street, with people taking ownership of this art-form, this inspirational film reflects the 21st Century and explores whether an art project can really make a ‘change’.

About the Filmmakers:

Alastair Siddons (Director) is an award winning film maker across a wide range of platforms including documentary, music videos and drama. He recently completed his first dramatic feature film In The Dark Half which is due to be released later this year. His internationally acclaimed feature documentary Turn it Loose (which JR contributed an installation toward) saw him make a film with six languages in countries as diverse as Algeria, Senegal, Japan and Brazil. Alastair has worked with JR for five years and was involved in the filming of Woman Are Heroes in Kenya, India and Cambodia.  Alongside a strong working relationship, he understands the philosophy JR brings to his projects and is in a key position to gain access into the inner workings of this wish.

(Profiled Artist) JR’s career as a photographer began when he found a camera in the Paris subway. His first book Carnet de Rue, about street artists, appeared in 2005. In 2006, he launched Portrait of a Generation, huge-format  portraits of suburban “thugs” from Paris’ notorious banlieues, posted on the walls of the bourgeois districts of Paris.  In 2007 he did Face 2 Face, which some consider the biggest illegal photo exhibition ever. JR and a grassroots team of community members posted huge portraits of Israelis and Palestinians face to face in eight Palestinian and Israeli cities, and on both sides of the security fence/separation barrier. He embarked on a long international trip in 2008 for his project Women Are Heroes, a project underlining the dignity of women who are the target of conflict. In 2010, his first film Women Are Heroes was presented at the Cannes Film Festival (La Semaine de la Critique), where it was in competition for the Camera d’Or award. JR is currently working on three new projects: Inside Out, Wrinkles of the City, and Unframed.