A Great Mistake

A Great Mistake is a 2010 genre-bending short film, directed by Abner Pastoll, produced by Junyoung Jang and written by Abner Pastoll & Gerlind Becker. The film starts as a Romance and then switches to Drama, before turning into Horror, followed by Crime, and then completing in Science Fiction in a grand time-travelling finale, whereby the main character travels back in time to the beginning of the film in order to fix a mistake, aided by his great-great grandfather - a fictional character based on H.G. Wells (played by Tim Downie).
Commissioned by Ernst Klett Verlag, one of the largest educational publishers in Germany, the film was originally intended as an English language learning film set against a backdrop of cinematic techniques and film genres - that can also be viewed as a short film in its own right.
Release
The short premiered internationally at the Cannes Film Festival in the Short Film Corner on 12 May 2010.
It also participated at the 14th Shanghai International Film Festival in China, on 16 June 2011, where it was nominated for Best Comedy.
It premiered theatrically to its first UK audience in late March 2011 (supporting the premiere showing of the director's new film Me or the Dog) to an overall positive reaction. The director stated that he wanted to create a film that works on both levels - "that is fun, wild and wacky and that doesn't feel anything like an educational film", whilst still remaining close to the curriculum of the schools.
Whilst the theatrical film version plays continuously as one story that switches across genres, the DVD version also breaks down each genre and showcases the specific elements and techniques used within each segment. It also prominently features items and/or names typically 'British' throughout the film; such as double-decker buses, fish n' chips, the red phone-box, Holmes, Jack the Ripper and the police.
The film is distributed throughout schools in Germany by Ernst Klett Verlag, and is the 6th and final DVD of their popular Action UK! series. Actors James Deacon, Katie Warsop and Tosh Wanogho-Maud have appeared in all 6 of these films.

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