Through the Stew came out of a love of No Wave cinema, punk music, and the spontaneous shooting style picked up from our trilogy of Gonzo documentaries. Although this combination doesn’t make for the easiest production, it never makes for a boring one and the final product seems to successfully achieve the sleepless, cigarette stained abstractness we associate with our time in the city. We were planning to visit our friends we had filmed back in 2020 for our short documentary ‘Always Fast, Hardly Accurate’ when we decided to make our own No Wave inspired fictional film, only using non actors, with no budget, and with our friends from Sunglasses for Jaws back in London to make the score. With a concept I had been thinking about for a while, a Waiting for Godot, Wings of Desire inspired story following a modern day outsider having to come to terms with his last day on earth being just as banal as all the rest. I wrote up a skeleton script, which we changed and evolved throughout, relying on improvisation from our cast of musicians, as well as our background in documentary and music videos. Made over a couple of days and nights of improvisation and guerilla shooting, the result is a sonically led abstract tapestry based in the gritty reality of east Brooklyn, punctured by surreal Super 8 footage and 50s Noir radio recordings, and we hope it advocates the joy and excitement of collaboration and the creativity you can find with little means at your disposal.

We first directed together back in March 2020, when on our way to SXSW we found ourselves stuck in Brooklyn, New York, with the festival cancelled. During this brief time in New York we had made plans to do a little filming with the female punk band Flasyd. While witnessing the fast approaching threat of the first COVID lockdowns putting a stop to most creative work for the better part of a year, we shot as much as we could over the two days we had in the city, culminating in ‘Always Fast, Hardly Accurate’, a short documentary examining the contemporary New York punk scene. We simply didn’t have the time for second takes, pre-planned out scenes or long, in-depth interviews. We filmed the documentary in the same style as punk music itself, fast, raw, rough around the edges but with an intense power and feeling that we could not have got any other way. The success of this film against many odds led to us co-directing a trilogy of short punk inspired documentaries chronicling people on the outskirts of society under the director duo moniker MILTON. Four years later and in a noticeably different cultural landscape, it would be only fitting to end this loosely thematic directing partnership back where we began, with the same crop of lonely characters and raw, unvarnished feeling, this time in a semi-fictional world of radio static and endless cigarettes.