Swansea Love Story

VBS.TV, the broadcast arm of Vice Magazine, will  release Swansea Love Story (part of the Rule Britannia series) in 6 episodes from the 12th February.

Co-directed and produced by Vice UK's editor Andy Capper and Leo Leigh (son of Mike), Swansea Love Story is about the largely unreported heroin epidemic in South Wales. The film is an intimate look at the lives of a gang of young addicts, their families and their surroundings. The film examines how unemployment, the breakdown of the family and the nature of love contribute to the dilemmas faced by a group of young people.

Describing the film Andy Capper said: ‘We wanted to make this film because we were tired of seeing homeless young people being portrayed as little more than statistics. Documentaries about drug use often come out pious and fail to really get to know the people behind the drug usage. We wanted to show what it was like to live with an addiction as realistically as possible.’

Swansea Love Story was shot from Spring to Winter 09 after Andy and Leo made contact with a gang of young addicts through the SANDS drugs agency.

The film follows Amy & Cornelius, Lee and Leanne, Clint, Kristian and Wills around their daily lives as they struggle to get money to buy drugs, alcohol and for places to live. During the course of the film, characters get clean and relapse. They fall in and out of love. We meet their families and drugs workers. We meet their dealers. We meet members of Swansea's mining and docker community who tell us how the city has changed. In place of industry there’s myriad bars, strip joints and cheap booze outlets. Racial tension often spills over into public protest and violence.

Click here for the full trailer on LastSite-TV

Patrick Gamble