exposures

For this I was required to venture into the forsaken wasteland of the north once again, as it was held in Manchester. I had passed through on my way to Bacup, but now I could truly take the city in. Turns out it's cold and the streets are really badly signposted. At one point I spent about two hours trying to find one of the venues only to realise that I was one street down from where I thought I was. Amazing. I was also propositioned by a prostitute on my first evening (though not on any subesequent evening, interestingly).

To be honest this was kind of my least favourite festival. The selection was rather weak and there wasn't really anything going on socially until the last evening. However, there were still highlights.

There were a few feature previews. The first I saw was Duane Hopkins' Better Things, focusing on three parties, a schoolgirl tormented by her jealous ex, an elerly couple struggling with a past infidelity, and, would you believe it, a hikikomori girl, whose main human contact is her dying grandmother. I felt it was enjoyable enough but not massively memorable.

The second feature was Phil Hawkins' The Butterfly Tattoo, based on the Philip Pullman novel of the same name. It's not the kind of film I'd usually go out of my way to watch, but I did rather enjoy it. This may have been helped by the fact that at least half the audience consisted of the cast and crew, which provided a great atmosphere, and the Q&A session afterwards was great fun, too.
The last I saw was Lindy Heymann's Kicks, about two girls who are so obsessed with star footballer Lee Cassidy they end up kidnapping him, but things swiftly go very pearshaped. This was, again, not something I would normally have gone to see, but was in fact very entertaining.
The shorts were divided up into categories. Rather than running through all of those, however, I'll just pick out the films I felt most noteworthy. As I mentioned, though, I felt this selection particular was a bit weak so there may not be that many.

Camille e Mariuccia (Samuel Romano) (sorry, link has no subtitles): About a young man, Elio, and an old man, Piero, both of whom are missing their other halves. Piero bugs Elio to drive him to the nearest police station to identify a body that may belong to his senile, wandering wife, while Elio is still coping with his breakup with his girlfriend. Like so many of my favourite films at this festival, this was a simple but poignant character study, and really enjoyable.

Hair (Stewart Comrie): It's about hair. You never would've guessed, would you? I'm good like that. It's all done in stop-motion with real hair, and it's actually quit impressive, to be honset I'm at a loss as to how he actually managed to pull alot of it off.

What Lies Behind Smiling Eyes (Robert Brandon): I'm not gonna spoil it as the twist is too good. A genuine surprise, I loved the hell out of this (enough to heckle the director when he got up on stage at some point, I don't remember why, as this apparently wasn't up for a prize or anything).

I think that's all, really.

A bunch of mates also had films showing here, including Andrea Malaskova and Danny Boyle, who I studied with, and Matt Marsh, who also studied at Kingston in the year before me. I also bumped into Mike Please, whom I sort of knew through contacts at Picasso Pictures, and Flynn, who I met at Bacup! It was kind of amusing to see him at both the first and last festival on my rounds. I also, to my great amusement, met Blaire Mowat, whom I knew through a rather ill-fated project I did with some colleagues, again, at Kingston. We all had a jolly drink up on the last night.

And that's that, I believe. At least, until I go to more festivals. I've got into the International Anifest in the Czech Republic (which is where Andrea hails from, coincidentally). I plan to go, as long as I can get my lazy ass round to actually booking the travel! It's a spa town, apparently, so I hope the weather's good. I will, of course, write a really boring account of that, too, only it won't be as belated as all these. I hope you enjoyed them, by the way.

Encounters Short Film Festival

Encounters, which I think is a fairly high-profile event, takes place in Bristol, which is a fair way over to the left for me, but thankfully my stay there was made simple by my good friend Michael Rokes, who worked with me at Cartoon Network earlier that year (incidentally, their offices are really fucking nice, and the hot chocolate from the coffee machine is top-notch). I remember it being spectacularly cold while I was over there, and it was a fair walk from Michael's place to the Watershed where the festival took place, but nonetheless I braved it for the two-and-a-half days I was there.

I lost my copy of the program which has all my notes, my plan for what I was going to see, and Richard Williams' signature (more on that later) but somehow I can actually remember almost all the films I saw. I'll try to pare it down as best I can.

I got there for the first evening, on Tuesday the 18th, and saw the Opening Highlights and Waltz with Bashir. My opinions on the latter are pretty well documented. I'll keep accounts of what I saw in the former to their own sections, as I would see all the noteworthy ones again later. The Emerging Talent 1 screening, which included my own film, was also on that evening, but I was going to see it again next day anyway so I didn't bother.

First thing on the next day was Emerging Talent 2. Keith Reynolds Can't Make It Tonight was kind of like xkcd, in that it used stick figures and alot of very dry humour. The Weatherman was a likeable, if inconsequential stop-motion film. I've had the stupid music from Last Time in Clerkenwell stuck in my head all week, and was only able to remember where I'd heard it when I came to do this entry. The most noteworthy film was Khoda, which I actually saw at Bacup (and would later see again at exposures), but failed to mention in that entry. It's basically a full oil painting for every frame, or at least looks like it. It's pretty pretentious, but it could've been a really good film rather than just a stunning technical achievement if the soundtrack weren't so unimaginably awful. I don't understand how anybody could be so painstaking in the visuals (apparently it took two years and over 6000 paintings) and then allow it to be so completely ruined by such an awful soundtrack. He also never picks the best frames for the promotional images. Oh well.


Next I saw the Cartoon D'Or Finalists. There were just 5 films here, but I only really liked one, A Mouse's Tale.

The red, white, and black art direction is pretty clichéd at this point, but it's still effective, and it was a well told story, and the cut-out style animation was extremely well executed (this is the kind of thing it really works for). It went on to win the Cartoon D'Or, too, so looks like I wasn't the only one who felt this way for once!

Next was Emerging Talent 1 (which I skipped the previous evening, as mentioned). I think this was interrupted by a fire-alarm, which led to it overrunning, and me leaving early to catch the next thing on, fruitlessly as it turned out as subsequent screening were sensibly pushed back. This would have led to me missing the one really good film in this selection, but thankfully it was shown again in another screening. That was Stand Up (why I'm having to provide a MYSPACE video link I can't fathom, it's not even complete, but it gives you an idea).

I think it used rotoscoping, but it really pushes what can be got out of the technique, as it didn't just put a graphic style over the top, the animators really pushed the movement. It's hard to explain but even the brief clip I posted gives a pretty clear idea of what I mean. It's a real treat visually and very funny. It seems to have won a good few awards too, which are well-deserved.

After this was a talk and screening on the work of Alexander Shiryaev, who was a ballet dancer by trade, alive in the latter half of the 19th century, but, after the recent rediscovery of his work, seems to have pretty much been doing animation of any sort before anybody else. He did hand-drawn animations of dances for instructional purposes , and ridiculously elaborate stop-motion films (up to 15 minutes in length!) at least two years before Ladislaw Starewicz, traditionally credited with having invented the medium, produced any of the sort. Pretty interesting stuff.

The last event of the day was Desert Island Flicks, a talk with genius British animator and film-maker Joanna Quinn (who some might know for films such as Girl's Night Out [flashing imagery warning] and The Wife of Bath, which I sadly have no link for). The format, as one might expect, was borrowed from Radio 4's Desert Island Discs, so we got to see a bunch of films that have inspired Joanna.

Highlights included Bill Plympton's Your Face (which is the only film of his I can't find on Youtube, TRAGIC as it's his best), The Hill Farm, and the Tex Avery cartoon King Size Canary. All in all the selection was great, and Joanna's a very entertaining personality, so it was a highly enjoyable talk.

Thursday started with Best of British: Made in the South West. This one was pretty high-standard on average, though there was alot that was included in others screenings, and the only film that really stood out for me was Leaving, about a woman trying to build up the courage to leave her abusive husband. Like most of the live-action films I've been picking out, it was the acting in this one that made it stand out for me. Hilariously, the male actor's name is Johnny Harris.


Best of British 2 was up next. Apart from Stand Up, nothing in this really stood out for me, though there were some points of interest, such as Time is Running Out (which I had to see twice to get) and Akbulak...though sadly I have a video link for neither of those, so a fat lot of good that is!

Next, however, was the Canon of World Short Films, which had some very interesting shorts. Au Bout Du Monde (At the End of the Earth) is an unspeakably hilarious 7 minute animation about a house perched on the top of a mountain (an interesting parallel to The Hill Farm).


Balance shared a similar theme, about 5 men stood on a floating platform, with every tiny movement changing its tilt.


La Vis. Almost too weird for words. Here's a synopsis stolen from here. "Mr. K is very good with his hands. He is kept busy building a UFO (in French: Voluntarily Unidentified Object). He was about to stick the sharpened strip of his screwdriver into a screw, when he realized there was no slot in it. How horrible and disappointing. After an unforgettable dispute with his wife, he decided to go and fight with General Administration of the State Department Stores of the Non Ferrous Metals... " One of those films where the whole world and all the characters in it have this great feeling of complete artificiality and contrivance. Worth seeing.

The next (and, for me, penultimate) screening was International Panorama 2. Most of these were actually pretty interesting, but this entry is getting very long and I want my dinner so I'll only pick out Szalontüdö (Tripe and Onions), worth seeing just for the punchline.


Last up was International Panorama 3. There were two films here really worth mentioning.

Dennis (partial video) , about a massively muscled man with a very young mind, who still lives with his mother. Sounds standard, and it is, really, but it's so sweetly told I have to mention it.


Skhizein, where a man his hit by a meteorite and ends up displaced 91cms from where he should be. This was, besides the Joanna Quinn talk, the highlight of the festival for me. Genius concept, very well executed. If you get a chance to see it I'd very highly recommend it.

Wow, that was alot of writing and pictures, wasn't it? Well, it was one of the most memorable of the festivals. I might even go next year.

Afterthought:
Now, earlier I mentioned Richard Williams' signature, which I lost. Yes, the man himself was actually there, promoting his new 16-DVD box-set The Animator's Survival Kit Animated. And, as I mentioned, I got his signature in my encounters festival program (I didn't have my own Survival Kit with me as I didn't know Williams would actually be there). I then lost it. Truth be told, though, I'm not actually bothered. While it may not be my place to criticise somebody who's been in the business as long as he has, and as helpful as the original Survival Kit book is, I'm not sure about Williams anymore. I tried to watch
Raggedy Ann & Andy: A Musical Adventure (which he directed) for the first time in well over a decade a while ago, and found myself unable to stomach more than 20 minutes. It wasn't just the constant insipid musical numbers, but the animation itself is just so...excessive. Constant, RIDICULOUSLY elaborate movement, often for no reason other than itself. It feels too much like hollow showing-off for its own sake. Masturbating onto animation paper. I mean, check out the intro to the animated Survival Kit: all the characters from the cover of the book spend a whole two minutes elaborately joining a grand walk-cycle bumsex parade. It's all very well but

What's the fucking point?

I need to check out Who Framed Roger Rabbit again.

onedotzero: adventures in motion

This festival was probably the least interesting socially, as it took place in my native London. So not really that much of an adventure: between screenings all I could really do was sit around waiting, the South Bank being far too expensive for me to be able to actually do anything. The fact that I didn't get any sort of concession for being a film maker apart from for the screening my film was in also made it somewhat less fun compared to say, Filmstock, which let its film-makers get into pretty much EVERYTHING free. onedotzero had the most consistently high-quality selection of all the festivals I went to, but somehow this actually makes it seem worse in retrospect, since everything just blends together and its hard to remember the highlights. There were highlights, however, (and low-points, too, but I'll get to those).

There were screenings over three days, grouped thematically or in other specific ways. I'll just pick out the most notable films that I can remember from each one, of course. I'm lazy tonight so you'll only get thumbnails and links for the REAL highlights. I'll also list them in ascending order of memorability, cleverly creating a build-up of tension resulting in a climax.

New British Talent 08:
This featured, suprisingly, films made in Britain. I've got "cheat neutral", "Procrastination", "big boy_74", and "operator" written on my program in massive fat purple marker, so I guess they must've caught my eye at the time. I can remember three of these: cheat neutral, a mockumentary making fun of the idea of carbon offsetting by comparing it to offsetting cheating in a relationship by paying other couples not to (yeah...); big boy_74 sees a man about to commit suicide in his car accidentally involved in a sexy rendezvous arranged online, was a little predictable but charming; and operator, which I'd seen before online, I think, in which a man phones up God and asks him why he can't lick his elbow.

citystates:
I remember this being fairly good, but to be honest I can't remember any of it. Alex Robinson, a mate of mine at Kingston had his film London showing alongside mine. However, the daft cunt in charge of editing fucked mine up, and edited together the three parts I had to provide it in without removing the overlap. I almost walked out, and certainly gave the first staff member I could reasonably hold responsible a very thorough talking to. Oh well.

j-star 08:
I remember thinking this was pretty interesting, too, but I can't remember anything from it either. I'm really on form today, aren't I? Oh, there were three episodes of the profoundly stupid Usavich. Make of it what you will.

studio aka: a retrospective:
Dedicated entirely to the work of London studio...studio aka. Most notably there was a showing of Mark Craste's new short Varmints, based on the illustrated book. It was okay. Looks very nice, though its environmental message was a bit hamfisted.

wow + flutter 08:
The theme of this was supposedly experimental work (if I understand the ridiculously flowery blurb correctly), but most of the British animation industry seems to be trying to be "experimental", so I don't see what good dedicated a whole section to it does. Oh well.
I say that, but actually, looking through the program, some of this stuff really WAS experimental, even by British standards.
Actually, when I say "some of this stuff", I really just mean David O'Reilly's WOFL 2106. I was going to skim over it as a mere curiosity, but in searching for it to link to I found his site and realised he's actually genuinely an insane genius. Seriously, he made a music video consisting almost entirely of video compression artefacts. And the absolute most ugly, jarring, visually offensive piece of moving image ever made. And all the props and illustrations for Son of Rambow, apparently. But seriously, fuck anything you've ever seen that you think is experimental. This man truly doesn't give a fuck what you or I or anyone thinks. And that makes him awesome. I personally think that alot of people that DO manage to be experimental don't seem to me to communicate any honest intent in their work, making it just difficult for the sake of being difficult and leaving me cold. But I find David's stuff incredibly compelling. He's apparently very successful, but unlike alot of genuinely original and successful people, the superficialities of his "style" haven't caught on, become mainstream, and subsequently been ruined. I hope it stays that way.


TOKYO!:
My personal highlight of the festival. This was a triple-feature, with the theme being fairly self-evident, I think.

Michel Gondry directed Interior Design, in which the female half of a couple staying with friends until they can find a flat feels useless, until she turns into a chair and is able to be useful to some random guy who picks her up.

Leos Carax directed Merde, about an insane, red-bearded, green-suited troll of a man living in Tokyo's sewer system, who occasionally comes out and scares people, then one day throws some grenades into some crowds, is arrested, and turns out to speak a language only spoken by two other people in the whole world, one of whom looks like his mirror image and defends him in court.

Bong Joon-Ho directed Shaking Tokyo, about a hikikomori (wowee!) who falls in love with a pizza delivery girl and forces himself to leave (this one sounds really mundane and obvious but it's alot cleverer than this synopsis implies). All three were very interesting and compelling.

As well as Alex Robinson and London, Danny Boyle who I also studied with was there with a special preview of Slumdog Millionaire. It was very well received, and I gather it's been doing very well lately, so congrats to him.
















Okay that was a lie, it's not that Danny Boyle, but I couldn't resist, even though that whole palaver has actually long since blown over. He was actually there with The Grand Old Duke of York (Danny where the hell's your website I want to link to you), in the "Top Draw" section, which I didn't see but which he said featured far too much rotoscoping. Matt Layzell joined us for merry drinks afterwards. It was a treat.

Apologies for the pared down reviews and sullen-to-surly tone of this particular post (I don't actually mean any offense to any experimental artists you may happen to like, either). I'm working tomorrow and it's past my bedtime. Hopefully I didn't offend the two people who (maybe) read this blog (hi, "Catherine"!)I think the next festival is encounters, which left somewhat more of an impression.

Film Stock 2008 (better late than never!)

Set in the sprawling dystopian metropolis of Luton, this wasn't such a big treck as some of the other festivals I paid a visit to during the latter part of the year, at least geographically. In filmwatching terms, though, it was to prove a marathon: two-and-a-half near-solid days of short films, with plenty of drinking in the interims. It was also the most enjoyable event I went to.

I arrived a little confused, and spent a few minutes finding the cryptically named "Hat Factory", which eventually turned out to be right next to the station. I met Neil, one of the two organisers of the festival (the other being Justin), Alex Barrett, a fellow film-maker who I would end up tagging along with for the rest of my stay, and a few other very welcoming and friendly people. Neil showed me to the pub he'd organised a room for me at (a rather nice place, actually, which somehow maintained complete silence in the rooms despite the pub itself being very noisy every night), then came back to begin the film-watching.

The Hat Factory
As I hadn't come on the Thursday, and thus couldn't see Choke, based on Chuck Palahniuk's novel, the first thing I saw was Fear Strikes Out, based on the true story of Jimmy Piersall's battle with being-bloody-crazy to become a big baseball star (which he eventually did). It was pretty good all-round.


This was followed by the first round of short films, which is what the entireity of the rest of my weekend's stay would consist of. As there were so many, I will try to restrict myself to one from each session of about 9 films.

Die Seilbahn (Claudius Gentinetta): A rather lovely animated film about an old man travelling up a mountain in a cable car, but his sneezing shakes it to pieces and he tries to hold it together with masking tape.My Blue Heaven (Yee-Wei Chai): A young boy living with an abusive father watches one of his porn videos one day. Hilarity ensues. Only not, in my opinion. It was beautifully graded but horribly forced and unfunny, with the worst child-actor I've ever seen. Ever. It won an audience award, though, apparently, so maybe I was missing something.
People Were There (Antoine Bourges): The film-maker filmed some random footage in the city while he and his friend talked about nothing in particular, then did some clever things with text in After Effects on top of the footage. It sounds super-lame, and sadly I have neither a link nor an image, but trust me, it was pretty cool.
Solitude (Mehrdad Sheikhan): Animated film about, um, loneliness (sidenote: along with my film and a few others this seemed to be a bit of a recurring theme here). Specifically, a sad rock-man living on a big rock cube floating in the sky. Far too long, and a bit dodgy in places, but had some very nice moments.E Finita La Commedia (Jean-Julien Collette): A father and son sit in a car, discussing life, sex, and "the mother". One of my favourite films of the festival, the dialogue and the whole thing in general were just very well done.
Arcadia (Adam Butcher): Very strange: an office-worker's computer starts talking back, while one of his co-workers says he's writing a second bible. Used actors shot against blue-screen on top of tiny built cardboard sets. The blue-screen was actually pretty badly done but it was such a profoundly weird film that it kind of added to it.
Also, judging by this, I think Adam Butcher is clearly some kind of insane genius.
Side Effect (Jae-ha Myung): A woman has to live with the consequences of her son being a criminal, specifically the abuse it gets her from her neighbours. Another one of my favourites, with some incredibly powerful acting. No picture here, either, sorry.
Tony Zoreil (Valentin Potier): A young man born to a family of big-eared people, on having to deal with how it affects his life. Poignant, charming, and well put-together.Ducks (Adam Young): Horny old people playin'. Sweet and rather interesting.
Sick (Mike Rymer): "As Brian's story slides backwards through 15 years of therapy, his daughter's crashes forwards." That's taken from the blurb in the Filmstock brochure, as I can't really sum it up any better myself, mostly because I can't remember many specifics. I've got "Great" written next to it in my Filmstock brochure, though, so I'd better mention it.
Cheeese (Huseyin Tabak): "A Kurdish family waits for help from American troops during the Iraq war, in the basement of their collapsed house." Poignant and sensitive, the title comes from the very clever and effective device of occasional photographs, taken by the son on a polaroid camera, which remain static on the screen for several seconds at the moment of their taking, with the dialogue continuing over the top. Another of my very favourites. I think my film came immediately after this, which was a bit intimidating, to say the least.
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik (David Ross): A ridiculously abstract film, the blurb calls it "A three-part pan-dimensional journey", but to be honest you could probably call it just about anything. A bit like watching screen-savers for 10 minutes, but it was kind of worth seeing in a theatre, it was just such a strange experience. You can check out the Youtube link (first of three parts) but it's really not the same as watching it in a dark theatre...half delirious after watching probably about a hundred short films over the course of a three-day-weekend. Apparently I wasn't the only one who (sort of) enjoyed it as it won an audience award.
Liminal (Stephen Keep Mills): Two naked girls arguing over the sort of thing only girls would argue about, a sweater that, to quote the blurb again, "Ina thinks makes her look good and Joy thinks makes her look too good." Once I was able to stop staring at their vaginas it was actually very interesting and engaging.
Lullaby (Kevin Markwick): A woman who lost a child years ago goes to the special place she always visits on his birthday to finally leave his memory behind. Very touching, with effective, understated acting. A favourite.

That was alot of films, wasn't it? There were a good few I had to omit but that's as many as I can really be bothered covering. The quality overall was up-and-down, but as I've said this was my favourite festival, chiefly because everyone was so friendly and welcoming. It really helped that I turned up at a quiet period when everybody was just sitting around chatting, but that would've meant little without a generally welcoming crowd. Dinner and drinks on the last night (for me: the festival itself went on well past just the Short Film Weekend) was a real treat, so thanks to Neil and Justin the organisers, Alex Barrett and Rahim Moledina for putting up with my following them around the whole time, and everybody else I spoke to and who was nice to me. I'll have to go back next year, whether or not I have a film of my own to enter.

Oh, actually, one more thing, they do something rather lovely and get people to write short comments on films they liked, and email you the better ones afterwards. I got some lovely responses, my favourite being "'Who amongst us hasn’t felt like locking ourselves in a room to get away from the outside world? And how great was Jonathan’s animation? The expression on the main character’s face was worth the price of my stockholders pass.' – Bill Greenberg". Somebody else also told me at the time that the characters was pure "Eeyore", which made me very happy indeed. So thanks also to Bill Greenberg and the other nice man whose name I sadly now forget.

Canterbury Anifest

So, after some procrastination, here's the next festival report: the Canterbury Anifest.
This was only a one-day thing, so it wasn't as eventful a stay as Bacup, however, it was still a fun event (despite the fact that I had to trudge for about half-an-hour through driving rain to get to the location). The B&B was also pretty nice (smaller than the first one, though).

This fest did of course feature shorts, but there were a couple of great talks as well. The first I went to was the Bob Godfrey Retrospective. Bob Godfrey is, of course, one of the geniuses responsible for Roobarb, among other things. A particular highlight of the talk was a showing of one of his earliest works, "Watch the Birdie" (which isn't anywhere online), a particularly hilarious and charming paper cutout animation about...well birds. While it's useless for me to say it, I hope you all get to see it someday as it is truly wonderful.Next up was the Competitive Shorts screening (which I was in). The only thing I really want to highlight from this is a film by Tom Senior, "One Nice Family Photo". It has a really, really rough, sketchy, painterly look to it that can seem cheap but that I feel Tom pulls off masterfully. It's not even rotoscoped (an easy approach to resort to with this kind of style).
It also features the best dog I've ever seen (well, maybe second best to Roobarb!)
I spoke to him and he's a really smashing bloke, so check out his website (which kicks the shit out of mine) and take a look.

The second talk was "Baahind the Scenes of Shaun the Sheep", which was, unsurprisingly, about Aardman's first animated children's series, Shaun the Sheep. I hadn't actually seen any of it before and it's pretty good (you can see a few episodes on Youtube). It's definitely nice to see old-fashioned stop-motion used on a successful and wide-reaching cartoon.
After that was the awards ceremony, at which I picked up the Creative Sound Design Award (which I felt kind of awkward accepting as Kenny Evans at Kingston gave me massive amounts of help with it). Tom got both the Technical Achievment and Audience Awards, so well done to him!

So, a short but interesting festival. Next is Filmstock, which was my personal favourite and promises quite a large entry. Coming soon!

Bacup Film Festival

I've been putting this off a fair bit, but I'm now going to start my long-promised rundown of all the festivals I went to last month (as if anybody reads this blog, hohoho). I'll give each one a seperate entry, and the first up is the Bacup Film Festival.

Held in the amazingly tiny hamlet of Waterfoot, in the middle of nowhere (the Rossendale Valley, which itself is somewhere in East Lancashire). It was an interesting start to my restival rounds as it was certainly the smallest I would go to, but also the furthest I would have to travel. I did get to stay in a really nice B&B though (although it wasn't especially cheap, but considering it was technically a double room and the shower was better than any I've used in the last five years I can't complain).

The festival itself took place in the Horse and Bamboo Theatre, and basically consisted of a couple of days of whoever wanted to turn up watching short films on a reasonably big projector screen, with drinks in-between, until the awards and best-of-fest at which point loads of people suddenly turned up, complete with local press and MP. I got talking to some people, including a nice Manchester lad called Flynn, a guy from Canada called Tyler (both of whom had films in the festival; though neither of them are online so I can't link) and others.

Overall the selection was, to be honest, a bit shaky. However, I later found it's actually more fun that way: onedotzero, for example, (which I'll cover later) had a consistently very high standard, but was somehow less memorable for it. I won't list loads of films, but here are some that caught my eye:


Bene 'N' Burnley: James Graham & Ricardo Martensen
A documentary about the Burnley Miners' Social Club, which apparently sells more Benedictine liqueur than anywhere else in the world. Basically lots of old people talking, and I'm all about old people talking. Though in all seriousness I did like that it informed about something specific and unknown, without getting so wrapped in that that it forgot to be interesting or relevant. This won best documentary.

Back In Ten: Barney Heywood (link is only an extract)
A boy waiting for his dad to come back from the supermarket ends up talking to a definitely-not-a-paedophile (really) old guy who is apparently Janis Joplin (somehow). A nice character piece, I thought, though maybe a bit forced in some aspects. Won best fiction, I think.

Red Sands: David Procter (no video link, sadly).
A documentary about bullfighting, but rather than trying to be an animal-rights piece, as one would expect, it highlights the dilemma between the cruelty of the practice and the importance and beauty of the tradition and sport. Proof of its success in this is shown by the following two quotes from this page:

‘Fuck bullfighting’
- Nedelcho Bogdanov – Director (Bulgaria)

‘That’s the first pro-bullfighting film I’ve seen outside of Spanish culture’
Rodgrigo Rios Legaspi – Director (Mexico)

Apparently some people left out of disgust during the awards ceremony, which I think is pretty cool. It's clear, though, that people's reactions to it very much stem from their own preconceptions. It won the Grand Jury Award, though oddly I didn't see it at any of the other festivals, even though it's already done the rounds in other countries.

I actually got to meet and speak to David (director) and Geoffrey Bellhouse (assistant director), who are both capital blokes, and we ended up getting shown around the inner workings of the theatre (including a spectacular collection of masks, costumes, and props which I wish my sister could've seen). Afterwards we went to a pub and got fairly pissed, then caught dinner in a nearby kebab shop, where we meet by far the ugliest woman I've ever seen. She took a liking to me and sat very-much-too-close to me before her older (and slightly less hideous) sister chased her away, and thus saved my life.

I know this anecdote is pretty lame without photographs, but unfortunately the only camera I have is a piece of rubbish so I never take it anywhere. You'll just have to picture it.

Other films I feel I should mention, even if I can't link to all of them:
Fashion Death: Daniel Rodrigo, which I'm actually mentioning because it was so awful. Just click the link and try to sit through it all (I had to do this twice, as it won Best Experimental Eilm).
All-Night Cafe: Flynn what's-his-name (sorry), who I mentioned above. Documentary filmed in a local 24-hour cafe, I thought it could've been really good but sadly he could only film for one evening due to an "incident", and had to just make do.
Pitch: Tyler Keevil (mentioned above), two film-makers stuck for an idea end up taking things to comedic extremes, I'd end up seeing this again at Filmstock.
How I Learned To Love Richard Gere: Detsky Graffam, first time I watched this I hadn't actually heard of Richard Gere (which I gather is fairly embarassing). Whether this made it better or not I'm not sure, but it was pretty funny.
I can't name either, but there were also two literally 5-second long animations (both stop-motion), which I thought a bit odd, to say the least.

All in all I enjoyed the Bacup Film Festival, enough that I might even go next year (if I feel I want an excuse to travel to Lancashire). This is not at all influenced by the fact that I won Best Animation (and a rather nice hunk of trophy-shaped glass) with Hikikomori.

Next up is the Canterbury Anifest, which I'll cover whenever I can be bothered.