Raised in Nottingham England, Shane Meadows dropped out of school as
a teenager. After some odd jobs and a shot at studying acting and photography,
Meadows volunteered at an art centre and learned the craft of film-making.
He borrowed a camcorder and taught himself a technique of making short
films with his friends as actors. After producing some numerous shorts,
he was approached to direct the TV documentary The Gypsy's Tale (1995).
Meadows also wrote, produced, directed, edited and co-starred in the
60-minute film Small Time (1996), winner of the Michael Powell award
at the 1996 Edinburgh International Film Festival.
Meadows was signed up to make the BBC-financed Twentyfourseven
(1997), shot in black and white, the film centred on Bob
Hoskins attempts to rescue the disaffected youths of a town by opening
a boxing club. His next film, A
for Romeo Brass (1999) was a bleak and twisted rites-of-passage
story set in the Midlands. Once
Upon a Time in the Midlands (2002), is Meadows’ comedic homage to
the Spaghetti Western genre, in which a man returns to the Midlands
to try to win back his ex-girlfriend. While Meadows’ films do not carry
the overt political messages of Ken Loach’s films, they do offer social
commentaries on the position of men in contemporary culture. This
is England (2007) was Meadows unromantic tale of one boy’s
troubled rite of passage during the Falkland War in 1980s’ England,
and widely regarded to be amongst the directors best efforts to date.
