‘The Yorkshire Dales are at their most alive when it’s really miserable and horrible,” says Jack King, director of award-winning British independent film The Ceremony. It’s the story of carwash workers from Bradford who end up in the countryside near the quaint village of Kettlewell as they carry out a grim mission with a corpse. “It’s a weird liminal space,” adds King. “It’s dead. It’s barren. There are no trees anywhere. It’s not like the tea-cosy version. It can be a really nasty place.”
Shot over 12 frigid January days in 2023, on a tiny budget of £120,000, The Ceremony was hampered by hailstones, flash floods and cold snaps that froze the moors and made carefully scouted locations inaccessible. Scenes were scrapped and layers hastily put on as cast and crew hunkered down in the local pub that served as their base. King says he embraced the elements and channelled a certain German director, whose struggles with on-set disasters are legendary. “I just wanted to be Werner Herzog,” he says. “The worse the weather and circumstances, the better the art.”
King’s novel approach to Dales mythology has landed well with audiences: the film won the inaugural Sean Connery prize at last summer’s Edinburgh film festival. It was a helpful leg-up for King who has been making short films in his home town of Bradford for two decades. He has also forged a partnership with the band To Kill a King, for whom he crafted half a dozen inventive music videos. The Ceremony is a different proposition entirely, a bold debut feature about some of the most talked about but voiceless people in the UK: migrant workers, specifically those who work in the shady world of hand carwashes.
It’s been a decade in the making, King says. After working on a short film about a dysfunctional hand carwash, he wanted to go deeper in a longer format. “I went all around Bradford,” he says, “trying to get anyone to talk to me, which was quite hard, because they were like, ‘What do you want? This is weird.’ So I got an interpreter, which produced slightly better results. She was a feisty Romanian who would boss them about like she was their mum.”
Supported by this no-nonsense interpreter from Harehills in Leeds, King slowly earned the trust of the people who worked in carwashes and began to gain insights into their lives. “They were talking about other stuff,” he says. “A lot of them were quite religious. People had very strong philosophical ideas. They had dreams and aspirations. It wasn’t just like, ‘Oh God, my boss is a crook and I’m scared of him and my life’s shit.’ There’s a lot more to it.”
The fact that King got anyone to speak is remarkable. Abuse is rife in the sector and the fates of workers are often in the hands of capricious bosses. Research in 2022 revealed that more than 90% of hand carwashes are likely to be employing workers illegally, despite government schemes to tackle such abuse.
During his own research, King discovered a world dominated by Romanians and Kurds who found themselves in places such as Dewsbury in West Yorkshire. “There was an interesting divide,” he says. “They wouldn’t really speak to each other. Basically, white and brown were separated.”
This is the tension at the core of The Ceremony. The carwash’s Romanian middle manager (Cristi, played by Tudor Cucu-Dumitrescu) and his underling, a taciturn Kurdish man called Yusuf (Erdal Yildiz), have to dispose of a body, as personal and cultural differences cause potentially fatal clashes. Cucu-Dumitrescu and Yildiz are two of just a handful of professional actors in the film. Most of the supporting cast were discovered in carwashes around West Yorkshire.
The Ceremony might look and sound like classic Brit-grit: dark images of a wet and weary industrial city complemented by a story about struggle. It might also seem like a political film, a Loachian response to the constant negativity from the far right and the rightwing press about migrants. But it isn’t quite what it seems. The miserable Yorkshire weather and Bradford’s dark streets give it a recognisable aesthetic but there’s also a magical goat that appears later on, one that has thrilled and baffled early audiences in equal measure. The small black creature has dominated post-screening Q&As. “People say, ‘I really love the film, blah, blah blah – but what’s that goat about?” says King.
King also describes the film as an allegory – and there is clearly some magical realism in the mix too, as unlikely bedfellows Cristi and Yusuf complete what is essentially a quest in the Yorkshire countryside. As the weather closes in, the worst sides of human nature come to the fore. “I wanted to make something that shows people with all their contradictions,” says King. “That’s the problem with a lot of films that just see migrants as victims or criminals. Especially now, you should be allowed to be both of those things – and something else in the middle.” The dark side of the Dales has never looked as good.
• The Ceremony is in UK cinemas from 22 August.
