What do you do when the town you grew up in seems to be falling apart? What can you do when you are regularly being invited to funerals of friends who are still supposedly in their prime? There is no easy answer, but producer Jez Lewis picked up a camera and headed to his town to make a film about it.

This unwaveringly intimate and challenging documentary is being tentatively touted as a commentary on ‘broken Britain’, but this label is very wide of the mark.

The small town of Hebden Bridge in West Yorkshire is a somewhat unique area. Once a mill town, industry collapsed and the working class townsfolk left. In the 1970s artists, new age activists and hippies moved in and so began a culture of drug and alcohol use that permeates the town today.

The extent to which elements such as these serve to build a social portrait of this tragic town, where suicides have soared well above the national average, are ultimately overshadowed by writer/director Lewis’s persistent chasing of a group of his erstwhile friends and acquaintances (Lewis himself had long-since left the town for the lure of London) and challenging them on why they are living out their lives addled with alcohol in a local park, and pushing them to question their actions.

The personal relationship between the director and several Hebden Bridge inhabitants make for utterly compelling viewing. Good-natured Cass is everyone’s friend, and a mainstay in the local park. He is a loving stepfather to a couple of young boys, and a loving son to his elderly mother. He is also dangerously close to liver failure. Lewis arrives at his side armed with his camera, a weapon of scrutiny and truth which, we are constantly aware, is Lewis’s primary weapon in confronting these people with the truth of their situation.

Needless to say that this weapon catches an enormous number of poignant moments, all made increasingly more heart-wrenching with every additional minute that we spend in the close company of these people.

Cass is not the only person whose life we are submerged in, a whole range of people are relentless pursued by the scrutiny of this director… and us, his audience. The experience that such determined, submersive and hands-on filmmaking creates is one of enormous intensity; and whatever wider social trends are alluded to or discussed in this journey through the soul of Hebden Bridge are merely peripheral discussion to be considered once this human drama has played out. To ignore the human core of this documentary is to ignore what makes it such superb cinema.