Although feelings about war vary, pretty much everyone understands that a soldier's life is a tough one. What many people don't realise is how tough it can be after coming home. How does it feel to fight for your country and then discover that it doesn't seem to want you? In creating his new film, Broken Britain, Mark Ashmore set out to investigate.
"I didn't just make this stuff up," says Mark, a soft-spoken, friendly young man who is trying to manage our interview at the same time as toasting crumpets for his tea. "Everything in Broken Britain is based on real things that happened to real soldiers. It's about a group of soldiers who've just returned from a six month tour of Afghanistan. They've lost one of their colleagues and they decide to visit the local club to pay their respects, but then the bouncers won't let them in. There's a sign on the door that says 'No hoodies, no baseball caps and no soldiers.'"
Regrettably, Mark says that this sort of thing is all too common. He's sympathetic to those who oppose the war in Iraq, saying that he thinks it is "basically just about oil", though it's not the fault of the soldiers, but he feels that the situation in Afghanistan is very different - the trouble is that the public don't understand this.
With Broken Britain, Mark is hoping he can change this. The film is already getting a lot of attention and it will feature at this year's Cannes Film Festival. He hopes it will provide a voice for soldiers and open a much-needed dialogue with the public.
"I'm from a forces family myself," he explains. "My cousin drives tanks in Basra, my grandfather was in the Royal Navy and a lot of my friends have served. I'm taking the film round TA centres to make sure soldiers get access to it and I've had a very good response so far. I went to an online soldiers' forum to do a lot of my research and they ripped the piss out of me there to begin with - it was a real baptism of fire - but once they understood that I was trying to help they were very supportive. There were about 150 people at the première and 40 of them were soldiers, so it's been very much a community-driven project."
Mark hopes to use his production company, Asha Media, to carry on making social issue films tackling discrimination, though he says that all his projects are very different. He started out as a theatre actor and progressed to TV, appearing in small roles in things like Doctors, Coronation Street and Life On Mars, and drew on his acting experiences to help him as a director. Besides Broken Britain he's made "three or four short films" and he's working on other features, but it's clear that this film is particularly close to his heart.
"I've had a lot of support from North West Vision and Media and from organisations like the charity Help For Heroes," he says. "They're my big backer. We feel that there's real injustice going on. My next film, Big Boys Don't Send Postcards, is in many ways an extension of this one. It's about American servicemen and Coalition forces in Afghanistan and how they interact, and it's about the discrimination they face when they come home. Things like the substandard living conditions they have to put up with. After what they've done, you wouldn't think it would be that much of a strain to find them nice flats. People don't realise how bad it is. I'm just trying to make sense of a mad world."
