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Islington Tribune - by TOM FOOT
Published: 27 June 2008

Penny Woolcock

From robbery victim to gang wars film-maker

Director recalls encounter with mugger ‘who seemed all right’

A MAVERICK film-maker – once the victim of a robbery in Holloway – is making a hard-hitting feature film about teenage gang crime.
Penny Woolcock, who shot to fame in the mid-1990s with her sex-fuelled romp The Principles of Lust, will talk about The Postcode Wars tonight (Friday) at a Holloway Arts Festival event.
Ms Woolcock, who has lived in Islington for 20 years, came up with the idea for the film after sharing a “moment” with her attacker, who repeatedly kicked her head during the robbery in Tufnell Park Road three years ago.
She said: “I felt my head go crack but my instinct was to hold onto my bag. When I finally let go he ran off up the road. I chased after him and for a moment we stood looking at each other across the street.
“He looked completely freaked out – and I thought, and perhaps I am mad, he seems all right.”
Her quest to delve deeper into the teenage mindset has resulted in a film she believes offers a solution to the worrying rise in violent crime.
No stranger to living on the edge – the event organisers have billed her talk as “obsession with extremes” – she has toured estates in Birmingham to find real-life gang members to star in her feature-length film.
She said: “All the people I have met are very bright and clever. They want to do something fulfilling. It is very simple really. Most of this happens because it is hard for young black men to get jobs. If you have been to prison it is difficult to get a job. It is about finding interesting things for them to do.”
The term “postcode wars” refers to a modern day phenomenon that make some estates no-go areas for Islington youths. For feuding gang members, stepping over the “front line” between N1 and E8 can mean death. Numerous killings, including the 2005 murder of Essayas Kassahun in Old Street, have been linked to the phenomenon.
Ms Woolcock said: “This is not something hyped up by the media. It is very real and happening every day. They have their own language and there are signs for each postcode area. It is very dangerous for young men to be caught in the wrong place.”
She will be “in conversation” with Nicola Abel-Hirsch of the British Psychoanalytical Society tonight.
Ms Woolcock said: “It’s quite strange – the idea of a public psychoanalysis. I guess she will ask me why a middle-aged woman likes to go and hang around on council estates.
“I guess I would say – because I get bored and I don’t like hanging around with people my own age.”
Her next work is an opera about the atomic bomb, which will be performed in New York later this year and at English National Opera in February 2009.
Tonight’s talk is from 7pm at the Tower Building at London Metropolitan University, in Holloway Road.
On Sunday, award-winning director Mike Leigh will talk to psychoanalyst Andrea Sabbadini about his films and plays, his working methods and his influences.
Tickets are £12 and £8 concessions. For details go to www.connectingconversations.org or call 07787 814316.

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