Archive for December, 2007

www.shortfilms.org.uk

Institute of Contemporary Arts (ICA) www.ica.org.uk/lsff
Curzon Soho cinema www.curzoncinemas.com
Roxy Bar & Screen www.roxybarandscreen.com
Amersham Arms www.amersham-arms.co.uk

The Projector with Teeth returns to 4 major London venues this January, with a new identity and a new name, celebrating 5 uncompromising years of short film and punk attitude.

After 4 years, the Halloween Short Film Festival now emerges as the London Short Film Festival, still proud to be the edgiest film festival in the UK, and bringing with it the best in new film and music across 10 days of screenings and multi-media mayhem. The cornerstone of the previous Festivals has always been imaginative and challenging programming, so for this year’s screenings, the Festival are pulling some special events out of the bag, alongside the best in new short films.

Including 14 programmes of new short films, selected from an open submissions process, which this year has seen record entries, the 2008 festival includes everything from comedy to horror, to experimental to documentary.

Awards and prizes will be awarded by UK Film Council and the VX Auteur Theory, plus Time Out, the LUX, Fortean Times, Dead By Dawn, Shooting People, a teenage jury, Channel 4’s FourDocs and others.

The festival also offers filmmakers and industry participants Howling Feedback, an ongoing array of free industry events and networking at the Curzon Soho and ICA bars, supported by UK Film Council, Film London, Rushes Soho Shorts, and Shooting People.

This year’s live events, part of Halloween’s on-going commitment to bring strong live music themed film & visual events to our annual Festival include Soundtracks ? Post-Rock vs. Found Footage, a night at the ICA to celebrate found-footage films! Award winning filmmakers Sarah Wood, Ben Rivers and Max Hattler use archive and found footage to create short films and visuals sets to screen tonight, to be accompanied by live music from three of the most experimental avant-garde outfits around, The Exploits of Elaine, Blood Stereo (along with a bunch of screaming ladyfriend guests) and Ladyscraper. The night will also include a selection of classic found footage work by People Like Us, Cordelia Swann and Anne McGuire. The ICA bar will also offer StreamLounge, open access ‘YouTube’-style VJing software, open to everyone to take part in. (This event is supported by Animate Projects.)

Music-oriented events include, Bristol Meth, focused around The Cube independent cinema in Bristol, a night of live music and independent short film from David Hopkinson (who brings Mr Hopkinson’s Computer), Lady Lucy, Rozi Plain, and others;

Roxy Acoustica bringing together a selection of live acts, including Their Hearts Were Full Of Spring, Monkey Don?t, and Roman from Bretton alongside showcase visuals from Prime Objective and BuzzardBuzzard.

Filmmakers-in-bands is the theme of the festival’s final night awards ceremony at the newly re-opened Amersham Arms in New Cross, with live sets from short filmmakers who?s sideline in rockin’ guitar outfits fits our Festival ethos perfectly. Headline set comes from Economy Wolf alongside VJ Max Hattler, and see Ben Blaine, Greg Butler, and Joe Tunmer away from behind the camera and with their bands!

Filmmakers Focuses include a Q&A with Asif Kapadia (FAR NORTH, THE WARRIOR) who will be in conversation, after a screening of his earlier shorts and short films that he admires, as well as a preview of his new FAR NORTH feature; Filmmaker Jes Benstock will overview his own 10 year career from performance to animation to documentary to music video; SeaBuzzard give us an insight into working on music videos and documentary with The Mighty Boosh, Foals, The Noisettes and The Mystery Jets.

The Guest List screenings programme invites partners & friends to showcase events and films, including Saint Etienne’s Turntable Café, which arrives with The Caravan Gallery for a night of discussion and photography; Club des Femmes, who celebrate punk feminist filmmaker Kathy Acker with a screening of her feature VARIETY plus shorts and readings inspired by Acker; Toronto’s Darryl’s Hard Liquor & P0rn Film Festival visit with a night of debauchery, comedy and fancy dress! Plus, the London cinema premiere of music documentary feature AMERICAN HARDCORE, with guest DJs beforehand showcasing their 7 hardcore collections (in conjunction with Visible Noise); Radar Festival, who premiere their new short film & music video selection alongside Q&A’s with the filmmakers; The DepicT! 90 second film competition, ThinkSync Films, BBC Film Network New Music Shorts all showcase new work alongside Q&A’s to meet the filmmakers involved. Plus screenings curated by UK Film Council, FourDocs, Dazzle Short Film Label, Shorts International, Bitesize Cinema. And not forgetting the Shooting People film pub quiz!!

I’ve been in Newcastle for the opening night of the Northern Lights Film Festival, hosted as usual by Tyneside Cinema which this year is relocated to Gateshead Old Town Hall while their building in Pilgrim Street is enhanced and extended.

I’m here partly because the Cambridge Film Trust is putting together a programme of events around the opening of the new building in the Spring, but also because I’m a Geordie and it’s great to have an opportunity to come up to Tyneside and visit Newcastle and Gateshead (and we’ll have none of that ‘NewcastleGateshead’ nonsense here).

I was born in Newcastle and lived in Jarrow until I was four, when my parents moved to the Midlands, so you wouldn’t know from my accent - apart from the hard ‘a’ in Newcastle, perhaps. And I’ve hardly been a regular visitor since we stopped doing family holidays that involved trips to South Shields and Whitley Bay when I was a teenager.  So it’s nice to be working up here, and may even give me a chance to reconnect to the area.

Last night I made it to the Tyneside for the short film showcase, and was pleased I did as there were some excellent films shown, including Zam Salim’s brilliant ‘Laid Off’, about life as a ghost, and Jesse Lawrence’s ‘Mash Up’, haunting in a very different way…

The opening feature was ‘Hvordan vi slipper af med de andre’, which my Danish-speaking friends will know translates as ‘How to Get Rid of the Others’. This dark comedy from Andres Ronnow Klarland is described in programme as ’set in a dytopian Denmark in the not too distant future’, and  it certainly deserves to be called ‘dystopian’.  The Danes have realised that the central state now has enough information on its citizens to do a cost-benefit analysis of each person, and decides to kill off those who are a net drain on resources. The chronically unemployed, feckless, addicted and socially disfunctional are evaluated against the ‘New Copenhagen Criteria’ and those who fail to justify their continued survival are summarily executed.

Set in a school that is being used as a concentration camp over the summer while a good productive Danes are away in the country, the action centres on the relationship between Major Christian Andresson, in charge of trial and executions, politician Volke, there to observe, and activity Silse who has infiltrated a group of misfits held in the school gym while awaiting their turn before the tribunal.

The echoes of Guantanamo are obvious, but the film also made me think of the law of unintended consequences - the New Copenhagen Criteria were a joke, an exercise in data mining carried out by a civil servant who was then surprised to see just how much the economy would improve if the bottom couple of percent of the population was exterminated.  As we move towards a comprehensive national identity register in the UK it’s hard not to see the parallels - especially as I’d travelled to Newcastle after speaking at the London launch of a new Demos pamphlet on personal information and privacy.