#film #warsaw #efl: Short Film: All About Steve by James Torr and Jonathan Walsh.
All About Steve, is a documentary that was made a few years ago by James Torr and Jonathan Walsh.
The focus of All About Steve is a teacher known as EFL Steve who mysteriously disappeared from Warsaw after claiming he was being poisoned by a sinister group. As the mystery unravels we also get a good look at EFL life in Warsaw, and its various odds and sods.
‘All About Steve' is a film project about EFL teachers, poisoning and Poland that Jonathan Walsh and I (James Torr) were working on in Warsaw, Poland between 2005-6. The film is as much about the main character (Steve) as it is about teachers, teaching and living abroad. Plot Summary The conception of the film began when the 'Steve' of the title, a fellow English teacher at International House School in Warsaw, took me outside the school for a cigarette one frosty Autumn morning. He told me that he suspected he was being poisoned by a group of Jewish friends of his. Two days later, he'd left the school, and was on his way out of the country. A month or two later, Jon heard from a friend of his that Steve had died. By coincidence, it turned out that this contact was one of the group of people that Steve had thought had poisoned him. According to this contact, Steve had died in a hospital in Krakow a few weeks previously. The story was too intriguing for us to pass, and thus the 'All About Steve' documentary project was born. Interviewing his co-workers, and people from this group of friends, we aimed to piece together a portrait of a man, a profession, and what it is like to be a stranger in a strange land. Release? When Jon and I started the film, all we had between us was a love of film, an eye for a good image, some digital editing software experience on my part, and a little cash for equipment. We had little to no experience making film documentaries, interviewing, camerawork, and almost no idea about how to get the film distributed once it was completed. We're still a little shaky on the last part, but hope the former were addressed during the making of the film, and are evident in the clips attached.’