EXCLUSIVE: Tull Stories has acquired UK-Ireland rights to Richard Hawkins’ psychological drama Think Of England, about government-backed porn films made for Second World War soldiers, from the film’s producer Giant Films.
Jack Bandeira, Natalie Quarry, John McCrea, Ronni Ancona, Ben Bela Böhm and Ollie Maddigan star in the film, which debuted at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in 2025 and played the Glasgow Film Festival earlier this year. It is now screening the Raindance Film Festival in London this month.
Think Of England draws on rumoured government experiments on how sexual appetite affected soldiers’ morale to fight. The Ministry of Defence sends six disparate people in the summer of 1943 to the Orkney Islands to create a series of clandestine pornographic films to boost morale and support the war effort.
Haunted and traumatised by the events of the war, each of the six – including a damaged former movie star soldier, the film’s German-Jewish refugee director and an aspiring actress working as a munitions machinist – clash as filming progresses and dark secrets emerge.
“Think Of England was born out of a fascination with morality, performance and the strange elasticity of what societies deem acceptable at any given moment in history,” said London and New York-based Hawkins.
“Although set during the Second World War, many of the questions the film asks, around censorship, image-making and the tension between public decency and private behaviour, feel increasingly contemporary.”
It is Hawkins’ second film following his debut Everything in 2004.
The film is produced by father-and-daughter Nick O’Hagan and Poppy O’Hagan of the UK’s Giant Films, who did the deal directly with Tull Stories.
“This fiercely independent drama has a truly exciting, grown-up premise and a dedicated and talented cast who give bold and uncompromising performances,” said Tull Stories founder Jonny Tull.
Producer Poppy O’Hagan said the film was ”made with an extraordinary level of passion, ambition and commitment from everyone involved. It was incredibly important to us that the film found a distributor who genuinely understands and champions independent cinema, and Jonny and the team at Tull Stories immediately felt like the right home for it.”
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