This time last year, British film-maker Carol Morley was tirelessly touring the independent cinemas of the UK, promoting her new film, Typist Artist Pirate King, one venue at a time. A quixotic account of an imagined road-trip between maverick British artist Audrey Amiss and former psychiatric nurse Sandra Panza (played respectively by Monica Dolan and Kelly Macdonald), it mixes tragi-comic fable with factual biography, and takes its title from Amiss’s own real-life passport description of her occupation. Like its subject, the film is alternately entertaining, inspiring and exasperating. But seeing Morley doing one packed audience Q&A after another – in which she described how a Wellcome screenwriting fellowship had led her to a vast cache of Amiss’s writings, drawings, paintings and collages – was a heady experience. As I told Morley after one particularly well-received event: “You should basically just accompany every screening of the film for ever.”
Now, Typist Artist Pirate King is on Netflix and finding an audience all on its own. Hopefully, its presence on the platform will lead viewers to seek out the back catalogue of one of our most thrillingly inventive and exciting film-makers, whose work includes an eye-openingly frank TV documentary, a brilliant big-screen docudrama, an acclaimed haunting British mystery, and an overlooked American neo-noir ripe for reappraisal.
