MAKING FILMS FROM HEART OF OUR COALFIELDS... FOR 30 YEARS
Wakefield-based One to One Development Trust has been producing films from the heart of communities for 30 years. Laura Reid speaks to its founder Judi Alston.
IT WAS 1985 and as she made her way up the M1 to begin an arts degree at Bretton Hall College, Judi Alston caught her first glimpse of a working coal mine. Standing just a stone’s throw from the motorway was the pithead of Woolley Colliery, the mine where NUM leader Arthur Scargill started work in 1953 at the age of just 15.
“It was so vivid that for me,” Alston recalls. “The miners’ strike had obviously been going on in the coalfields but up until that point my only experience of it was that I was working in London at the time and there were a lot of miners and miners’ wives collecting money on the Tube. I would always support it but it was like a distant thing for me until getting to Yorkshire.”
Within four years, she immersed herself at the very heart of those mining communities, launching a video-production partnership to document life in the coalfields. It was the start of a long and continuing career for Alston, whose organisation One to One Development Trust is now 30 years old. Based at the Art House in Wakefield, the trust works with communities and organisations to produce films, apps, websites and virtual-reality experiences on a range of topics. Its aim? To inspire and inform and to push boundaries in how people engage with heritage, health and wellbeing and digital storytelling.
It was not a direction that Alston saw her life taking. She grew up in Peterborough and took a job at an insurance company in London after leaving school. But when her father died when she was just 18, the grief and upset sparked a desire for change. “I needed a change of scene and just applied for colleges all over,” she says.
Bretton was the first place to accept her and during her time there, Alston began experimenting with video. “I was always really interested in how society works and how people think and respond. I suppose that was my driver artistically.
“I never had any intention or desire to become a film maker. I thought I’d be an art therapist or something. Then in the final year of college they bought a video camera and it was really exciting. That was the start of things really.”
Alston launched One to One Video with a friend in 1989, a year after graduating. The pair attended a business and enterprise programme at Huddersfield University and took an office at the newly refurbished Westfield Resource Centre in South Elmsall, which was also supporting exminers with new business start-ups.
“It was a two-edged thing,” Alston reflects of One to One’s beginnings.
“From a heritage perspective I knew those stories [from the coalfields] were really important but also to me it was about working in the communities in an almost healing way and promoting health and wellbeing as well.”
After a year, Alston’s business partner left. But she carried on. European funding helped One to One set up an edit suite and buy cameras. It ran community film-making courses as well as producing professionally shot films documenting life in the changing coalfields during a period of pit closures in the late 1980s and early 1990s. “When those pits shut down, everything fell apart in the communities,” Alston says.
“The whole infrastructure went. The pit would shut down, then the pit club would close then the trips to the beach each year that families relied on for a holiday would stop and the local sports club would close down. It had a massive ricochetting knock-on effect and I was really aware of that.
“In lots of ways it was a very hard time,” she adds. “But it was also a time when we were seeing people making life-changing decisions. Some ended up going to university or college and their lives transformed unbelievably. I think that’s a fascinating legacy for Yorkshire and its coalfield communities.”
Alston’s first proper film commission, Bands and Banners, was about the creativity of brass bands and the art of union banners. The NUM went on to commission the company to cover miners’ marches while other bodies would pay for Alston to run projects and courses with miners.
For a short period, she and her team were commissioned for TV broadcasting. For one programme, Bosnia Fading, they followed an aid convoy, run by a couple from Pontefract, into war-torn Bihać for two weeks. The city was under siege for three years from 1992 to 1995 during the Bosnian War. “It was so maverick in those days,” Alston recalls. “We were film makers that had never done anything like that, never gone to a war zone before. It was a bit of a shock.”
On the first night, one of the artists on the trip was arrested, suspected of being an infiltrator. “He got locked up and we had to bail him out of jail.
“We had no provision of how to deal with that at the time. There were also people finding landmines everywhere – we had to be really careful where we walked. I got bitten by a dog they thought had rabies and got rushed to hospital. It was a crazy trip.”
Over time, One to One’s remit has broadened beyond just film to community projects, research and multi-media commissions. What has remained consistent is Alston’s desire to tell stories – and, though it isn’t something she set out to do, at times her work has been used to influence and campaign, channelling messages to try to impact social change and challenge stereotypes. For over 10 years, One to One worked closely with Barnardo’s and the Joseph Rowntree Foundation on projects with groups including young mothers and people with drug problems.
“Our films can be used to influence policy or funding or they can be used as tools for advocacy and learning,” Alston says. “We’re really good at capturing people’s stories that are real and then being a conduit, taking those stories somewhere else and affecting change.”
Among One to One’s more recent work was a project earlier this year for Wakefield’s Museum of the Moon festival, to celebrate 50 years since the lunar landing. The trust created an interactive space adventure called Zero Gravity Lunar Library. Using virtual reality, it gave visitors the chance to clamber on board a space-shuttle version of a 1960s mobile library van, accessing old footage of the city and films of people talking about their relationships with the moon. It is something she hopes to tour round the district’s libraries in the coming months as One to One continues to celebrate its 30th anniversary.
Reflecting on its three decades, and looking to the future, Alston says: “Whether it’s using film, or virtual reality, or any other digital technology, and whether it’s working with groups in Wakefield or anywhere else in the world, to me it is all about valuing stories, nurturing people, celebrating culture and pushing the boundaries on how we can use technology for good.”
She has one admission though: “We’re really good at telling everyone else’s stories and we’re actually not that good at telling our own.”
Well, Alston, there it is.
To me, it is all about valuing stories, nurturing people, celebrating culture and also pushing the boundaries on how we can use technology for good.
Judi Alston, CEO of the One to One Development Trust.