Lynne Ramsay

Lynne Ramsay

Lynne Ramsay was born on December 5th 1969 in Glasgow, She is the Director and Writer known for her films 'We Need to Talk About Kevin (2011)', 'Morvern Caller (2002) and Ratcatcher (1999). She has been married to Rory Stewart Kinnear since March 2010. Lynne uses a lot of Children in her films in which she focuses on the Children's Perspective. Lynne Ramsay's work bears a powerful personal imprint. Her films are marked by a fascination with children and young people and the recurring, unresolvable themes of grief, guilt and death and its aftermath. They are low on dialogue and explicit story exposition, and instead use images, vivid details, music and sound design to create their unsettling worlds. In April 2013 she was selected as a member of the main competition jury at the 2013 Cannes Film Festival. In 2015, she was named as a member of the Jury for the Main Competition at the 2015 Venice Film Festival.

Gasman was Distributed in 1998, the film is set in 1970's Glasgow living in difficult surroundings, the films main theme is Family and Love. The film is about "It's the Christmas season. With her mom's help, Lynne, a girl of perhaps eight, dresses up; her younger brother Steven plays with a toy car. The children leave with their dad, who's affectionate with them. They walk down a railroad track where an unkempt woman waits with two children, about the same age as Lynne and Steven. The children go with them. They're all headed to a holiday party at a pub. Lynne notices that the girl acts all too familiar with her dad. What's going on".

Ratcatcher is set in Glasgow, 1973. The city, despite its Victorian grandeur, has some schemes with the poorest housing conditions in western Europe, such as no running hot water, no bathing facilities and no indoor toilet. The city is mid-way through a major re-development program, demolishing these schemes and re-housing the tenants in new modern estates. The problems in these schemes are somewhat compounded by the binmen going on strike, creating an additional health hazard and a breeding ground for rats. The main character, James, is a 12-year-old boy, growing up in one of these schemes, which is gradually emptying, as the re-housed tenants move out. James, with the rest of his family, two sisters, one older, one younger,his mum and heavy-drinking father, patiently waits to be re-housed.

Due to Lynne being brought up in Glasgow she sets a lot of her work in Glasgow and uses children to create a sense of innocence in her films. She incorporates what life was like back when she was a child and re-creates it in her own artistic way through the eye of a camera lans.