It's a well-made film and hard-hitting. There is blood everywhere when COW's car is struck by another car and the convincing aftermath belies the low budget thanks to the co-oporation of the emergency services.
Directed by Peter Watkins-Hughes, a short clip on YouTube of the 30-minute film has proved very popular with the US media. Texting while driving is not illegal in the US and CNN, CBS and Time have covered the film.
Less explicit public information films there have not had the impact of this film.
Gwent police originally had approached the director to make a film on joyriding, but the school pupils felt that texting while driving was a more important issue.
In the clip, a baby is motionless and a child asks when his parents will wake up.
COW the 17-year-old driver has to be cut from the car while her friends lie motionless. The film cleverly combines the procedural reality of the emergency services with the emotional and physical consequences for the victims and is brilliantly acted by a young and unpaid cast.
Being distracted while driving usually does not involve a crash and this film shows what can happen. I work as a lollipop man (sorry, school crossing patrol officer) outside a primary school and see people looking their phones frequently as they drive toward me down a little village high street.
When I commute on my motorbike, I sometimes filter between lanes of slow traffic (I used to be a motorcycle instructor). I have often seen people texting and even people trying to read documents as they queue in their cars. Three times in about 30 years of riding, I have moved out of the queue into the centre of the road before a whole queue of cars crashed into one another, in front and behind.
I don't know how many accidents are actually caused by texting, but the film's well-told message highlights the ease with which distractions can cause accidents. This is a much better approach to making a road safety film than the other shockers commissioned by the government to support the anti-speed campaign.
The dead children in those films simply manipulated sympathy for a bureaucratic strategy of practice-based evidence that ignored actual evidence from real accidents that speed was a factor in less than five per cent of crashes.
Driver error and drinking are much bigger influences on accidents.
The anti-speed campaign group Brake once produced a show stand that asked motorcyclists when they would kill their next child. A search of accident data bases by Motorcycle News found no record, not a single one, of a motorcyclist having killed a child.
Watkins-Hughes' film looks really good. It's horrific and portrays the worst that could happen, but it does stress paying attention to where you're going, one of the chief causes of accidents.
Show the whole thing all over Britain.
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