IN OFFICIAL SELECTION 'THE CULT' WRITTEN BY NICK GOULDEN

BIO:

Nick Goulden writer/director/producer and founder of Keen City has worked on promotions, commercials, corporates and shorts. His latest short, Alleyman, recently won the Achievement in Film Award at the British Independent Film Festival. Alleyman also received a prestigious Honourable Mention at the Los Angeles Film Festival. Goulden has a long history in films for such a young director. The first film he made was “dreadful, really, but wonderful”, and he counts his early jobs as a runner on big budget films as “invaluable, exhausting but most of all, unpaid”. The latest Keen City project, The Cult, is “original, contemporary British comedy with a heart”. He has no fear of the rapidly changing state of the industry, not with “more people accessing media than ever before”. Goulden takes immense pride in his work, and enjoys the competitive nature of the industry.

He holds such varied figures as Jeremy Irons, Ralph Bakshi, David Niven and Albert R. Broccoli in high regard for equally varied reasons. Even with the fullest understanding of filmmaking being as much to do with art as it is to do with business, he makes no apology for the fact that he is in film to “try and make the world a better place”. He is a dreamer, a thinker, and oxymoronically, an idealist with a predilection for pragmatism. This is reflected in the vision he lays out for Keen City. Simply, he says, that quality begets recognition, recognition begets success, and success begets funding for an even better next project.

"Have you ever noticed that anybody driving slower than you is an idiot, and anyone going faster than you is a maniac?" - George Carlin

Logline:

Seven lost souls join the mystical Guru Tao for an ‘Enlightenment Experience’, and are taken on a journey to hell and back. Via Hampshire.

How do you describe it in two movies? Little Miss Sunshine meets Sideways.

Synopsis:

Lugubrious greetings from the walking spiritual void that is Guru Tao. Or is it fraudulent academic Professor Thomas Whittaker conducting a social experiment on cults and their members? Or perhaps American inveterate conman Frank Lovelocke? But then maybe, just maybe, they are all the same person. Such is the dilemma at the heart of The Cult. Frank Lovelocke, a congenital and frequently incompetent fraudster, lures seven lost souls - including a lottery winner, a disaffected recently redundant adman, a female Olympic snowboarder and a former Mujahedeen soldier – to the Holy Land. Also known as some isolated woodland in Hampshire.