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.
The Cambridge Film Trust presents the European Premiere of
THE MEMORY THIEF
A film screening and discussion with director Gil Kofman
Saturday 3rd November, 5.00pm, at the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse
Post-screening discussion with Gil Kofman, led by Dr Ferzina Banaji (Lucy Cavendish, Cambridge / Institute of Holocaust Studies, Washington DC)
THE MEMORY THIEF, written and directed by Gil Kofman
Blazing a trail of heated debate at Festivals across the USA, this audacious thriller provokes reflection about the Holocaust through the engrossing tale of a young man?s search for meaning and identity. Lukas is an aimless, haunted young tollbooth clerk in contemporary L.A. A chance encounter with a Holocaust survivor suddenly brings into focus a world and an identity he embraces with frightening intensity - the victimized Jews of World War II. Kofman?s striking film confronts the horror of the Nazi genocide while continually interrogating the way collective memory and forgetting of the events are mediated through film.
www.memorythiefmovie.com
A Cambridge Film Trust event, in conjunction with the University of Cambridge Screen Media Group
www.screenmedia.group.cam.ac.uk
Book tickets at the Arts Picturehouse, www.picturehouses.co.uk
Box Office: 08707 55 12 42
Ignore the listing of the Festival Top Ten on the right - voting wasn’t stopped after the festival so it doesn’t reflect the real situation. We’ll fix it, but in the meantime here are the results.
It won’t come as too much of a surprise to regular festival-goers to discover that the over-dressed Canadians won our hearts, and that Rock, Paper, Scissors: The Way of the Tosser was the top-rated film.
Winning the audience vote really can make a difference to a film’s fortune - the 2002 audience favourite, the Norwegian comedy ELLING, went on to a nationwide cinema release on the back of its championing by Cambridge’s film lovers - so let’s hope that RPS has similar success.
The rest of the top ten are:
2: The Elephant King
3: How to Cook Your Life
4: Waitress & I Want to be a Secretary
5: A Crude Awakening - Oil Crash
6: Under the Mud
7: Surprise Movie
8: Lady Chatterley
9: Every Step You Take + The Intimacy of Strangers
10: Transylvania
Tell us what you think about Cambridge Film Festival and you could win a meal for two at the official Festival restaurant, De Luca Cucina & Bar!
The 27th Cambridge Film Festival finished on Sunday with a gala screening of THE HOAX to a packed cinema, and now there’s only the clearing up to be done. We’d like to thank everyone involved, and all those who came to see the films
We are always looking for ways to improve the Festival and really want to know what you think. We would be very grateful if you could take just a few minutes to complete our online survey. The findings of this research will be used to inform the future development of Cambridge Film Trust, the charity which runs the Festival, and the Festival itself
All participants will have the opportunity at the end of the survey to enter a prize draw to win a meal for two at De Luca Cucina & Bar, but please be assured that all your responses will remain completely anonymous and will only be reported in aggregated form.
The survey will be available to complete online until Monday 30 July: please click here to get started!
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