CCTV Central Control is a film by Chris Hurst for Tom Warner’s commended poem in the National Poetry Competition 2013, commissioned by Filmpoem and Felix Poetry Festival in association with the Poetry Society.
From the National Poetry Competition judges: ‘This poem, focussing as it does on CCTV’s capturing of social goings-on, lets its small paranoid domain stand for the whole world, which is a good thing for a poem to do – trusting in the small to suggest the big. Written in meaty blocks of four line stanzas, the poem reveals a few of the characters in this shifty universe, and some of the rules for surviving in it. And as for those under surveillance, the feeling seeping out from the poem is that these lives are somehow altered by the act.’ {Matthew Sweeney}