Birmingham Live
Monday August 13, 2018
New take on Lord of the Rings by Somali-born Birmingham director
A present-day Lord of the Rings fan-film shot in Birmingham has had more than 230,000 views on YouTube in its first two weeks online. The
Return of the Ring (LOTR fan film 4K) offers a new twist on the JRR
Tolkien classic, which became a multi Oscar-winning hit for film
director Peter Jackson.
Fifteen
years after his silver screen trilogy concluded with a box office worth
more than $3 billion, The Return of the Ring has been set in modern-day
Britain for less than £1,000.
Shot in various city locations in
just four days, the 22-minute film follows a resilient Elf who finds out
the Ring has returned and sets out to re-claim it.
Bporn in
Mogadishu in Somalia but now living in east Birmingham, 28-year-old
writer-director AR Ugas has moved on from wedding videos to start
narrative filmmaking and screenwriting.
Full name Abdul Rahman Ugas, he says: “I loved the Lord of the Rings films, but couldn't finish the book to be honest!
"In a unique twist on the genre, my story does not take place in a medieval setting with horses and swords. “Rather
it’s set in modern day Britain and follows a resilient Elf who finds
out the Ring has returned and sets out to re-claim it.”
James
Alexander Barnett from Wolverhampton is the cinematographer on The
Return of the Ring and the original score has been composed by Yunus
Khan.
AR, as he calls himself, was moved to Holland when he was a
baby because of the civil war in Somalia and then went to Egypt for
four years in his late teens.
Thanks to his Dutch passport and the EU, he was able to move to Birmingham in 2009.
Now working in a call centre and as a health care assistant, he
dreams of emulating M Night Shyamalan (The Sixth Sense) as a filmmaker
aiming for higher concepts than standard genres.
"Once you live
in the UK the world opens up to you," says AR, whose father buys and
sells land in Ethiopia while mum lives in Brum.
"If you make it here in the creative world, you can make it anywhere.
"I
may or may not make a Chapter 2 to this film, because you are not
allowed to make a penny with fan films because you are dealing with
somebody else's property.
"But my next project is a feature film
called We Have The President's Daughter - and a producer is lining up an
Emmy winner to direct it.
"Paul Wilmshurt has directed shows like Doctor Who and in 2006 he won an Emmy for the documentary Hiroshima."
The original Lord of the Rings films, released from 2001-03, were
called The Fellowship of the Ring, The Two Towers and The Return of the
King.
The trilogy won 18 Oscars from 30 nominations, including best picture at the 2004 Academy Awards.
Born in 1892, the future author JRR Tolkien was a young boy when he lived at 5 Gracewell on Wake Green Road from 1896 to 1900.
His playgrounds were the still-green spaces of Moseley Bog and Sarehole Mill.
The Return of the Ring – story
After the events in
“The Return of the King” in which the Ring was destroyed and Sauron’s
empire collapsed, peace was spread throughout Middle-earth.
But
that peace was not destined to last long. Incursions and raids by wild
bands of Orcs and opportunistic land grabbing by the Dwarfs sends
Middle-earth into a spiral of violence.
A worn-out Aragorn,
facing never-ending rebellions, war and famine decides to take drastic
measures and launches a genocide campaign, cleansing Middle-earth of
anything non-human.
The Race of Man manages to end all the other races, slaughtering them and sending the survivors into a life of hiding and exile.
They destroy any sign of their civilisations and thousands of year later there are no more traces to be found.
Their history, lives and suffering are nothing more than fairy tales.
That’s
when AR's story starts. Illyandra, a young Elf, discovers that the Ring
has made an unexpected return. She sets out to find it and use it to
revive Sauron, now seen as a folk hero to the non-human races hiding in
our society.
The Ring was sent to John, a young man who will have to make a choice that will decide the fate of our world
Five things director AR Ugas has said on Twitter during his The Return of the Ring journey
1.
June 30 – after a long period of sporadic planning, shooting and
editing, I can finally say that we’ve completed ‘The Return of the
Ring’.
2. Plan a project. Start a project. Work on said project
& finish it. Too many people follow their own hype, announcing a new
project every other week and not finishing a single one of them. You’ll
get a reputation as not being serious which is destructive. Trust me.
3.
Even the (worst) film can get accepted into any random Film Festival on
the other side of the world (that was only set up to make money). You
can trick your aunty and ex on Facebook but you won’t trick the
industry. Message: don’t play yourself.
4. Don’t wait for people to become big before you start supporting them.
5. Some of the best films don’t make sense to a lot of people. Look at a man like David Lynch.