Unmade Beds is a twee melodrama that follows the interweaving lives of two young and losts named Axl and Vera. Set in and around an East London squat, it portrays an ultra-modern party lifestyle within its own vision of aspirational cool.

With nothing in his pocket but a dream, Axl arrives fresh-faced in London from Madrid to find his father. In between sleeping around, boozing (he does quite a good Sam from Quantum Leap impression by seemingly being the only person with no idea where he is or how he got there every time he wakes up), and generally just hanging ten, he constantly pesters an estate agent he believes to be the man he’s looking for. Meanwhile, Vera meets a boy in a bar who strikes up a conversation and shows her a trick with a match. They ride the highs of love before misfortune separates them just as quickly. The instances their lives cross are sweet and humorous; Axl wears a striped jacket that Vera’s beau left at the squat in which both Axl and Vera live without being aware of each others existences. Dazed Digital met up with the Argentinean born director, Alexis Dos Santos, ahead of the premier on Friday to talk about filming, fate and squatting.

Dazed Digital: Why did you choose to set Unmade Beds in east London?
Alexis Dos Santos: I’ve been living in London for the past ten years, mostly in Hackney and Dalston, and it just felt like the right place for all these things to be happening. I knew the area, which is supposed to have the highest concentration of artists per square metre in the world.

DD: Was it all filmed in London?
ADS: No, a lot of the scenes were filmed in Nottingham. We had money from the Midlands so we had to shoot something there. We thought it’s actually a good thing to move sometimes and shoot where everything is easier. In London everything is so complicated, people have to travel so much, and in Nottingham you're five minutes from location.

DD: Is Unmade Beds based on your own experiences?
ADS: Not really. The stories are fiction, but I used to hang out in a squat that some friends of mine were living in, which was actually in Brixton. That’s when I started to think maybe I could include the squat in the story. Then I started shooting in a squat that some other friends of mine had. It was a massive warehouse. No one knew how many people lived there and there were loads of artists and musicians and people crashing. Everywhere you looked there was something that looked like garbage, then you looked closer and it was an installation that someone had made. That’s the place that I tried to recreate.

DD: What’s the idea behind Unmade Beds?
ADS: Most of the things that I write often have something in there about how random things can be, and the coincidences within that chaos. It’s about how these two stories develop and how they mirror each other in different ways. Sometimes there’s one element that goes from one story to the other, sometimes it’s the music or a dance, or an emotion that goes from one story to the other or that is shared by the two characters.

DD: Is it a film about fate or coincidence?
ADS: I don’t believe fate or religion or God, I don’t believe in anything. I do think it’s funny when little coincidences just happen. I was trying not to go too far with those things. You don’t want too many coincidences otherwise it’ll ruin your story. So hopefully they are subtle coincidences.

DD: What are you working on at the moment?
ADS: I’m writing a novel and writing a script with Laurence Coriat, who’s worked a lot with Michael Winterbottom. She wrote Wonderland and Genova.

DD: How did you find the transition from writing scripts to a novel?
ADS: It’s related to the film I’m writing with Laurence; it’s the same characters and stories. When I write, I always write little stories or I take a character and I write all his diaries like personal diaries. I think the script format is really boring and not very inspiring, so I go into the literature format.

Unmade Beds is in cinemas now