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GROW YOUR OWN

Grow Your Own takes us through one year of growing, pruning and harvesting in the Little Eden that is Blacktree Road Allotments.

Some people keep allotments because they like the taste of fresh vegetables. Some go there for the company. Some of them are looking for love. Some of them are looking for the perfect manure. Some go there to escape from their marriages. One of them is there to escape from something much, much worse.

Grow Your Own started out life as a documentary that producer Carl Hunter, a former musician with socially conscious group The Farm and his partner Clare Heney had been trying to make over a period of years. Their inspiration was psychotherapist named Margrit Ruegg who had pioneered a project in Liverpool to help asylum seekers, many of whom had been forced to leave the war-torn Balkans in the most violent circumstances. Under Ruegg's scheme asylum seekers were given a plot of land in addition to more traditional forms of psychotherapy. Hunter said "Because it was found that if you put these people in a room with a table and a chair and asked them to talk about their trauma, it's like a solitary confinement, they just close down. But if you put them in the open air, in a garden, these men and women open up".

Eventually Hunter teamed up with friend and writer Frank Cottrell Boyce  and director Richard Laxton (Life'n'Lyrics) to develop their work into a feature film. Grow Your Own is produced by Warp Films and Art in Action.