Palooka

Palooka is my first narrative film, a parable about the state of London's job market, filmed and edited in February 2024.
It follows a character called Dave: after being fired from SpecSavers for allegedly being a pervert, he is forced to take an unpaid job as the receptionist at a dysfunctional casino called the Win-O-Rama. The film focusses on the many strange and convoluted dynamics between the staff, as well as Dave's desire to make something of himself, to have a positive employment experience.

This film is an ode to the weird, gross, dingy spaces that I hope London still consists of, that form the invisible spine to all underground urban culture. The seedy all-day clubs that function on a tangled network of overqualified, depressed staff and underqualified management, who are just trying to invent a worthwhile way to spend their time. Everyone involved is telling themselves constant stories about their real social importance, whilst trying to ignore the fact that they have ended up in this situation by accident, that their relationships with their co-workers are totally arbitrary. Through telling this story I'm trying to get out some feelings of fear I have about the clinical nature of gentrification, the way it removes the possibility (and necessity) of these purgatory-like underbellies. It doesn’t feel like you should romanticise the grittiness of what’s getting removed, but these depressed spaces are undeniably human. They almost feel like magnets that you try to avoid. 

I’m trying to look at the really existential prospect of having a career that becomes defining of who you are, and asking questions about what it means to care about a workplace that you know is bad for you. What humanity can be retained when someone is overexposed to boredom for a long period of time? What kind of relationships form in that space?

Palooka was screened at 'here are our berries' in February 2024, an exhibition I co-curated with my housemates to share work made in the winter/hibernation period.

The full runtime of the film is 19 minutes; I am currently looking for opportunities to screen it. In the meantime I have made this excerpt available on my vimeo channel. Please get in touch at sonya.woodruff.art@gmail.com if you'd be interested in screening the film.