Alex Donaldson on his short film about county lines, Out There: "It's important to show they are victims"
A new short film explores London's county lines drugs trafficking crisis through three powerful firsthand testimonies
The character of Carl in my book, Cut Short, is fictional. But he is based on the experiences of a real young person who, alongside the other two main characters, Jhemar Jonas and Demetri Addison, helped me to pen its pages.
Over the five year story, Carl starts as a smiley, confident and polite 14-year-old before becoming entangled in cycles of criminality after his dad leaves his family home and he is permanently excluded from his secondary school.
At the depths of Carl’s descent into territorial fights, social media provocation and police arrests, he became involved in 'county lines’ drug trafficking. He would ride the train to small towns outside of London and locate a neglected house in which drug addicts gathered. It was a bleak existence of chain smoking and pizza boxes, hiding behind grey net curtains and evading CCTV cameras, cutting up Class As on the kitchen counter.
Fortunately, Carl was eventually able to seek help from services, youth workers and mentors before it was too late. But many young men and women who get caught up in county lines are not so lucky or self-motivated, nor are they given the opportunity to isolate themselves from harm.
Like any social problem left to fester in hidden impoverished pockets, the illicit drug trade across the UK has strengthened over decades, ruining lives in the process. It now thrives in forgotten rural and coastal areas, driven by rampant socioeconomic inequality, the decimation of public services and a growing generation of impressionable inner-city teenagers disappearing from their family homes for days at a time.
Most people know what county lines means from newspaper headlines. But the perspectives of young people who feel forced to partake in it are rarely heard, let alone depicted sensitively and collaboratively on our screens.
Out There is a new short film directed by Alex Donaldson which tells the story of three young characters. As co-editors of the film’s script, the young people narrate the circumstances, influences and realities of county lines themselves while delicate moving images bring viewers into the world that once trapped them.
Shot on 16mm film between Poplar, east London, and Sheerness-on-Sea, Kent, at just six minutes long, the film is a punchy, powerful documentation that confronts assumptions about drug-dealing, child exploitation and human agency.
I spoke to Alex about how Out There came about and what he learned from making it.
You can watch the film at the bottom of this newsletter.
Ciaran Thapar: Hi Alex, tell me about your filmmaking.
Alex Donaldson: I’ve been focused on making short documentary films for about five years, and they focus on young people in London. I like exploring that line between what is real and what is cinematic, between nonfiction and fiction.
What inspired you to make Out There?
Someone I know from early school life got heavily embroiled in county lines trafficking, but I only learned about it later, in a south London newspaper. The crimes I read about were shocking, but they didn’t match the character of the kid I knew. I always found those stories quite fascinating from then on, specifically the idea of kids that have quite a hyperlocal existence, who otherwise don’t really leave their area, ending up in a random, remote part of the country doing county lines.
How did you choose your location?
We shot the out-of-London scenes in Sheerness-on-Sea in Kent. The Medway towns are the most common destinations for people doing county lines from London. A lot of the more common Medway spots like Chatham and Gillingham aren’t very photogenic, they’re a bit new town-y, but further along, Sheerness-on-Sea is like an island, accessed by one road. Calling it an archipelago makes it sound more exotic than it is. It’s cut off from the country. It feels alienating there.
How does Out There differ from normal depictions of this social problem?
A. lot of other films and docs tend to be 90% experts speaking on the matter, talking heads. Not a lot of stuff gets into the day-to-day imagery of what it’s actually like; it’s focused on having a shock factor, not the more mundane stuff, like sitting in front of the TV for hours on end. And a lot of it is not firsthand experience from those who have been through it, which is why a lot of what you hear in Out There is verbatim interview.
How did you approach young people to ask if they could get involved?
I spoke to a lot of youth workers, charities, solicitors who’d repped young people in court, others who’d alluded to it in podcasts or YouTube videos. I had a spreadsheet of about 100 or so people who said no, but a few agreed. That’s how I eventually managed to sit them down over Zoom. Then we edited the interviews together, into what became an audio script.
How did you choose the three characters?
We spoke to a couple of others whose stories didn’t quite fit. Our line of questioning was also to do with visuals, and we wanted to articulate their thoughts and feelings around their displacement. For a variety of reasons, some kids aren’t as good at articulating that. We failed in getting more out-of-London voices too. For example, Liverpool is a top county lines spot, where people get trafficked from, but it’s already a quite sensitive topic, right? And when you are an outsider with a southern accent, it’s even harder to get access. Eventually, we settled on a balance of those who have, without a doubt, been exploited, but who still claim a little bit of agency. But even those who claim agency are still being exploited in one way or another, even if they don’t recognise it.
How would you like the film to challenge the audience?
In most households across the country, people would be able to tell you what county lines is. It’s become tabloid-y. There are a lot of headlines about it, criminalising the young people doing it. I think it’s important to show that they are victims, and that these drug networks are powerful — at the top, they’re not ran by teenagers.
What was the most challenging thing about making the film?
Doing it with very little budget. Ultimately it’s quite ambitious. Because of financial factors there are parts of the interview that made good stories, that would have enriched the narrative story to some extent, but would have been expensive to shoot. When cutting the script, we had to be wary of what was feasible given that we were working with a shoestring.
What about moral or practical challenges?
We had to anonymise them all. So I’d say it was a challenge in terms of, some of their stories are quite specific to areas and communities, so having to mask and anonymise that while still telling the true stories was tricky, but I got round it. Part of the reason these are the people who have come out the other side of it is that they’re the type who are more likely to give me an interview. They’re good at articulating their experiences, but we condensed four to five hours of interviews into six minutes, and there were more difficult bits that we chose not to keep in. For example, the girl was talking about concealing drugs inside her body, and during the interview I could see in her face that it brought back negative emotions. She couldn’t finish her sentence and wanted to move on. Which I obliged. The six minutes we picked were the golden nuggets, but there are lots of areas where they struggled to articulate their experiences.
What did you learn about county lines from directing the film?
Ultimately there is a patchwork of how these kids end up in these positions. And not to be pessimistic, but it’s only going to get worse with continued austerity and the cost of living. Opportunities to climb out of poverty are lessening everyday. A lot of the ways the police deal with county lines and drug trafficking is dealing with symptoms rather than root causes of these things.
Such as?
They’re trying to treat county lines cases as modern slavery, rather than criminalising young people. On the surface, that’s good, but what inevitably happens is that they’re not getting the guy at the very top when they’re penalising people. They’re just charging older kids who have been doing it for longer. But they’ve been exploited, too, and I still think they’re charging the wrong people — young men and women who have been a victim of the cycle themselves, rather than the people at the top.
Interview by Ciaran Thapar
Watch Out There here:
I teach a course called ‘Writing for Social Impact’ at City, University of London.
The next course is Friday 15th & Saturday 16th September 2023, and there are further monthly dates across the next academic year until June 2024.
A FREE place on the course is available for a young adult (18-25 years-old) from an underrepresented background and/or facing financial difficulty. Please email me on cthapar27@gmail.com to enquire if you are interested in this.