Making a film is hard.
Making a film for Netflix?
That's something else entirely...
Not because of the prestige — though the prestige is real.
Because of what it requires.
The discipline to sit in an edit suite for thirteen hours straight, day after day. The focus to watch two hundred hours of archive footage, frame by frame, twice, looking for the perfect moment that makes everything else make sense. The creativity to find the story inside the story. The leadership to hold a vision across eighteen months when the easiest thing in the world would be to settle for something good enough.
I didn’t want good enough. I never do.
— Derby. Nottingham. London. Netflix. —
I first met Owen Tooth on the set of a low-budget indie horror film in Nottingham. I was a lead actor and he was assistant Director. We didn't speak much.
A few years passed. Then — out of nowhere — a message on social media. I checked his profile. He’d been editing significant films and television programmes. Shadow directing for the BBC. Building a serious body of work. He was also now in a wheelchair, and was advocating, with the same intensity he brought to everything, for equal opportunities in the film industry for disabled people.
I told him what I had. Over two hundred hours of archive footage from the 1970s, 80s and 90s. A story about my grandad and the Serenaders — the best marching band in the world, built by a welder from Derby. I’d raised some money from the Banding Together event. I needed someone who could help me shape it into something.
Would he like to meet and talk?
We met at a coffee house. I showed him a few bits of the archive.
He got excited.
He said:
I’m in.
Between early 2023 and mid-2024, Owen and I worked in an edit suite at Derby University. We are both intense people. We work intensely. Thirteen hours straight was not unusual.
Our strategy was simple and total: leave no stone unturned. Watch every single second of the archive together — Owen with his editor’s eye, building meaning, finding the aesthetic moments. Me providing the context. Getting Owen inside the world. The sights and sounds and smells. The characters and relationships and history. Everything I knew, everything I remembered, everything I’d been told.
The only way Owen could edit the story was if he understood the world from the inside. And the only way he could understand it from the inside was if I was in the room, talking him through it.
Partway through, a man called Stuart Barry got in touch. Bodger, to everyone who knew him — the way the band world assigned nicknames, inexplicably and permanently, to the people who belonged to it. Stuart was an ex-Serenader. We hadn’t spoken in nearly twenty years. He’d heard I was making a film.
Could we meet at his house?
When I got there — four big boxes on the floor.
Just got down from the loft, he said.
Inside: the Serenaders at contests in 1972. The European Championships in Belgium in 1973. My grandad
leading the band as drum major. Carnivals. Beaches. Trophies. Faces I hadn’t seen in decades — my mum and dad in their twenties, young and alive and full of it. Me and Sharon as toddlers.
And then — Coventry. 1975.
Roy Barry had filmed all the floats coming into the carnival ground from the parade. Thousands of people lining the streets. The sun coming through the screen so vividly you could almost feel it on your face. The candy floss and the fried onions and the Wurlitzers.
Owen and I watched it in silence. Until the tape ended. Then we looked at each other.
I was crying.
Owen — who hides everything except the moments when something truly gets him — said:
"Fuuuuuuck."
We could feel, not see, a bygone era.
The belonging and the community spirit and the joy of a world that no longer exists — coming through a Super 8 screen, fifty years later. We knew. We had something extraordinarily special.
And then there was my Nan, Dorothy.
Holding my hand. Silent. In full colour.
Fifty years ago.
Dorothy Chabeaux — the girl from Speke who wrote letters to my grandad, Harry Bell, a nineteen year old soldier at El Alamein. Whose name I carry. On a Super 8 film in Stuart Barry’s back room in Spondon, Derby, her hand around mine — recorded without knowing, kept without knowing why, found fifty years later in boxes in a loft.
I didn’t know these films even existed.
Stuart Barry — who left the Serenaders acrimoniously in the 1980s, who joined the rivals, who I hadn’t spoken to in thirty years — had them. And one day he cleared his loft and thought:
David should have these.
The inheritance finding its way home.
— Netflix HQ. 13th December 2024 —
Owen and I built a pitch for a twelve-minute documentary film. We went through four rounds of selection. The final round — the two of us in Netflix HQ in London, pitching to a panel of some of the most significant documentary makers in the world.
Felicity Morris, who directed The Tinder Swindler and Don’t F**k With Cats. Bao Nguyen, who directed The Greatest Night In Pop. Anna Higgs, Chair of the BAFTA Film Committee. Zainab Ali Khan from Netflix UK Original Documentaries. And others of equivalent standing.
That panel.
David Chabeaux and Owen Tooth — who first met on a low-budget horror film in Nottingham and barely spoke — standing in Netflix HQ pitching the story of a welder from Derby who built the best marching band in the world.
We were one of six filmmaking duos selected from over ten thousand entries.
Six. From ten thousand.
“What wonderful talents you guys are.
BAND is an extraordinary story told brilliantly.”
- Zainab Ali Khan, Commissioning Executive, Original Documentaries, NETFLIX
"
First, came the 'Behind The Scenes' Trailer, put together by in-demand New York based Londoner Bobby Eccles
And then BAND premiered at The 2025 Raindance International Film Festival, London.
_
BAND · Netflix Documentary Talent Fund Winner.
Official Selection · Raindance Film Festival 2025
BAFTA 2026 eligible
Owen Tooth · Director
David Chabeaux · Creator, Producer & Subject
Owen Tooth went on to become the first wheelchair director of EastEnders in its forty-year history and BAFTA 2025 Breakthrough artist.
_
I am exactly like the people I work with.
I had a story I couldn’t fully see. A vision I couldn’t shape alone. A fire that needed someone else in the room before it could become something real.
Owen was that person for me. Stuart Barry — twenty years of silence, four boxes from a loft — was that person too. And Bodger, who I hadn’t spoken to in two decades, sent the inheritance home without knowing quite why.
That’s what this work is. Not a methodology. Not a framework. A belief that the thing people are looking for is already inside them — and that sometimes all it takes is the right person in the room, at the right moment, to help them find it.
I found mine. I made something with it.
Now I help other people do the same.