Details of the surprise announcement about the axing of the UK Film Council amidst dozens of other arts quangos. 23.58 With the Facebook group inching towards 5,000 members, and the petition well over half that, the web is awash with comment and analysis. Andrew Pulver, Ronan Bennet and John Woodward all have pieces in the Guardian,  the BBC have rounded up some industry reactions and also put a few dozen UKFC short films to watch on Film Network. 18.05 The regional screen agencies are safe (for now), according to the DCMS in a quote published on Northern Media's website. 17.03 These Twitter streams are good places to keep up with latest developments and opinions: 'Film Council' and 'UKFC'. There's also a 'Save the UK Film Council' Facebook group and a petition. 15.31 Questions over - with hints that the axe may not have fully fallen and a clear sign that there will be further be consultations. 15.15 The DUP's Ian Paisley is asking about the UKFC. Jeremy Hunt replies: 'We have not announced a decision,  we have announced that we are considering doing this, as we want to hear everyone's views. The UKFC spent £3m on back office administration last year and we want to ask how that money could be better used to support filmmakers." 15.10 So that was a very brief statement. Nothing new learned. Except asking about England's 2018 World Cup campaign is 'a very good question'. 15.08 Now on to the World Cup 2018. What!?! 15.08 'Every penny to be spent frontline services and not on back office bureaucracy'.  15.06 'A brief statement'. Says Jeremy Hunt. Finally. He does use the phrase 'considering the closure of the UK Film Council' as if to say there is sti .....

Just found this, made me smile. From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia Revision as of 17:44, 16 December 2005 (edit) 86.133.150.154 (talk) ← Previous edit Revision as of 17:16, 20 December 2005 (edit) (undo) 192.18.1.5 (talk) (Serious copyvio removed, this is slightly better but still needs work) Next edit → (4 intermediate revisions not shown) Line 1: Line 1: - Apple Computer has applied for a trademark on the term 'Vingle'. + A '''vingle'' is a [[portmanteau]] of ''video'' and ''single''. The [[neologism]] refers to [[music video]]s .....

Once in a while comes a film that has me looking fearfully at the clock, worried it will end soon, not wanting to leave the world it creates. With the word on the street that the team behind Skeletons - Britain's answer to Being John Malkovich - have a number of sequels in the back of the closet, I have a little hope that this might not be the end of Bennett and Davis. Indeed today's news that the team have picked up the Michael Powell Award for Best New British Feature at the Edinburgh International Film Festival today is most promising. By far the freshest, funnest and best looking British film I've seen in a very long time*, perhaps since Ben Hopkin's cult and rarely-seen Nine Lives of Thomas Katz and I really hope it gets a better release than that film so we can see the psychic Kim and Aggie return to the trenches. Allegedly.

[*Four Lions and In The Loop are obvious candidates as well, but neither have such cinematic production design, photography and locations]

The Film Festival press release follows the trailer and a brief scene from the opening of the movie.

 

A few months ago I downloaded an open source add-on for Joomla, the (free) software that powers Netribution. It's a powerful tool which should make a nice addition here at some point - and it was free. So impressed was I after half an hour of using it that I checked out some of the add - available for it. I could buy alternative templates for $19 a time, an iPhone version, integration with other bits of software - or the whole bundle of extensions with a year of updates for $99. Plus there was a discount code of $20 floating around. It took me about five minutes to decide to make the payment. To reverse this process, psychologically: if at the beginning I had learnt about a good piece of software costing $80 I would probably have ignored it and looked for something cheaper or free. Instead, because I got something very powerful at no cost, that I could try out, I decided to trust the software developers to make something even more incredible at a price. It reminided me how the film and creative businesses who succeed on the internet will be those that find a way to first offer something incredible for free, and then offer something even better that is worth paying for. Music is pretty much there. Listen to a song on MySpace or Spotify or wherever, and like it enough to pay £25 to see the artist in concert. Radiohead made more for pay-what-you want In Rainbows than their previous three albums combined, and followed with their largest tour in years. The same with books - Cory Doctorow's and Paulo Coelho's sales famously rose after they began to offer the full texts online for free. For film tho we have a significant challenge. The non-free experiences worth paying for are merchandise, DVDs and going to the cinema. DVD sales are in decline, while merchandise and cinema releases are typically reserved for bigger budget releases. This is why the news that Franny Armstrong's Age of Stupid made £110,000 (over $160,000) through non-theatrical exhibtion - eg screenings in community groups, schools, town halls and conferences - is worth paying attention to. She not only probably made more money for distributor-free exhibition than anyone in British film history, but also got people to promote her film endlessly for free (the same people who had previously funded it's production, often). At the same time, while Franny didn't offer the full film on the web, she created a huge universe of free content that could be watched and read online, as well as a compelling narrative from the film's .....

Back in March during the battle between The Hurt Locker and Avatar at the Oscars, much-loved political theorist Zizek waded in with a comparative review of the politics of the two films. His conclusion was that James Cameron's film had been the best attack on the military-industrial complex and US corporate hegemony. Kathryn Bigelow, on the other hand, he argued, legitimised the Iraqi invasion and the actions of American soldiers by normalising them and their life - the Hurt Locker is not a pro-war film, but in making the protagonist soldiers sympathetic it inadvertently supported the politics behind them being there. To continue this argument thru then, to follow everyday Iraqis in the aftermath of the invasion on film, as Iraqi-born Mohammed Al Daradji does in Son of Babylon, is to support the wider views of the Iraqi people and those one would expect to be hostile to an invasion. Here, then, is the first big revelation of the film. While the American soldiers are called pigs by one character and loom in the background, hovering overhead, the villain threading through this tale is the ghost of Saddam and his Ba'athist party. Indeed, in one of the many lighter moments in the film, it's revealed that 'talking to Saddam' is a way of saying you're going to the toilet. And as the film unfolds and we move from wrecked cities to a giant prison complex to the first of many mass graves, we begin to understand why. As we are told at the end of the film, some one million Iraqis have gone missing in the last 40 years, with between 150,000 and 250,000 dead uncovered so far in mass graves. In short, the film is a devastating, breathtaking masterpiece. With such heavy subjects at its core this would always be a powerful film. But Al Daradji and his team weaves a work of great drama built upon faultless performances and world class cinematography. We start on an empty road in the middle of the desert. A young boy and his weathered and wise grandma wait in the midst of nothingness. It's a brilliant start which pulls us into the narrative with the deft hand of a skilled storyteller. What unfolds is a road movie, and - like the Illusionist - a child / senior relationship - things that we have seen often before on screen. But they travel across a landscape that we have not seen. Perhaps at the edges of some of war films, but unlike most of these, and almost all films on Iraq to date - this film does not involve the military; there is barely one line of dialogue f .....

Under director Hannah McGill, Edinburgh International Film Festival has been steadily building its reputation as a platform for great animation - showing the UK premieres of Ratatouille, Wall*E, Up - and this year Toy Story 3 - in a bumper year which includes the world premiere of the hotly tipped 'British Team America': Jackboots on Whitehall. But few films could be better suited to open the festival than Sylvain Chomet's follow-up to the Triplets of Belleville, which seduced audiences the world - the Illusionist, from a Jacques Tati script. For not only does this film deal with the art of illusion and make believe, through a vaudevillian magic act - much like the Presto short which front-ended Ratatouille - but it's a hymn to Scotland and a love song at that. When James MacGregor wrote on Netribution many years ago that Chomet was set to make a film in his adopted homeland of Scotland, I was a little suspicious that he would take the task seriously. Perhaps like his segment of Paris Je T'aime, it would be a short look at some of the delights of Edinburgh's winding streets and windswept corners. What comes out instead is an unrestrained love letter, capturing the city we've all seen and loved, but going further, flying above the rooftops to give it a twist of magic and delight I've never seen. The film couldn't be better suited to the festival, indeed in one scene the magician Tatischeff hides in the Cameo cinema - one of the festival venues - and watches a little slice of Tati's Mon Oncle, a knowing wink to the film's origins. In some ways you could see the film as a sister film to Up - perhaps 'Down' would best name it - an old man, close to his end, goes on a journey, accompanied with the optimism of a child. Indeed the theme tune is almost the same and there's an animal side kick to boot. It is perhaps unfortunate that a dispute regarding the Tati estate should emerge ahead of the film's release, but the information released by the Richard McDonald, the grandson of Tati certainly increases understanding of the film. To realise that the giant of French cinema had himself come from the Parisian music hall, and left a young woman t .....

Arriving at last year's Open Video Conference, after a decade of writing mostly outside of the tech sector about how the web is shaping film, was like walking into a bar after walking across a desert with little water. The excitement of meeting so many similar (and more talented and inspiring) people lasted long into the year.

The inaugural OVC in New York was the first attempt to bring together web pioneers, indie film and videomakers and Open Source and free speech activists. It was a chance to listen to and meet the people who make Wikipedia, Firefox, VLC, Miro and Creative Commons, along with the likes of Xeni Jardin, Ted Hope, Jonathan Zittrain and Nina Paley.

The second coming will run October 1-2 and one of the organisers tells me they are aiming to get 1400 delegates this time round. If you have something to present or discuss, there's seven days to get a proposal submitted to the conference organisers - if accepted they may be able to assist with travel expenses.

More information about the conference here, and the submission details here.

While there is some hint that the new British coalition government will follow through on the Lib Dem policy of rescinding the rushed and hated Digital Economy Bill to let it get full and appropriate scrutiny, I would imagine that many new cabinet members are grateful to Ben Bradshaw and Lord Mandelson for pushing through an unpopular piece of legislation as a parting gift and saving them from having to implement it themselves. However the expected consequences of the Act on the healthy and profitable parts of the digital economy (from coffee shops with wifi to iPhone developers), essential for any kind of economic recovery or new growth, means the new government should at the very least reconsider the last government's approach to the problems of piracy and the promise of the digital economy. It may be that the OFCOM guidelines currently being discussed can exempt public wifi, scrap website blocking and push the three strikes option further into the future. But it may end up being smoother to introduce a new Act in 'DEAct's place, closer to Lord Carter's original recommendations before Mandy yachted with David Geffen and amended the public consultation. For what it's worth, I outline below five points that I think should be held in mind when shaping policy or campaigning in this area. 1. The Sky is not Falling DVD and Music revenues are currently rising (DVD up 31% Q1, UK music sales up in 09,  digital royalties rise outstrips CD fall). Indeed, file-sharers using the Pirate Bay apparently spend 75% more each year on music and film than non-filesharers (£77 as opposed to £44 pa).  2. Hollywood is stalling on providing legal alternatives There are very few legitimate, comprehensive and competitive film streaming or download services: iTunes has less films than Tescos and getting your film on there is very hard (plus it costs more than my video shop, which makes little sense). Penalising consumers before the content industry has offered proper download solutions de-incentivises the studios to collaborate on these solutions - indeed shortly after the Bill went through, Hulu.com dropped plans to launch in the UK. Currently there is a lot of delay from the studios over technology as all of them want to control it. Piracy may be the most effective motivator to get them to release a legitimate alternative - ie. without filesharing we probably would never have had music industry .....

New films from Woody Allen, Mike Leigh, Stephen Frears, Jean-Luc Goddard and Oliver Stone will premiere at the 63rd Festival de Cannes, while Ridley Scott's Robin Hood is the opening night film.

Running from May 12 to May 23, the event also sees the debut of Enda 'Hunger' Walsh's tantalising collaboration with Hideo 'The Ring' Nakata, Chatroom, Woody Allen's London shot You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger, Sophie Fiennes’s Over Your Cities Grass Will Grow and Frears modern-day retelling of Far from The Madding Crowd, Tamara Drew. Full line-up after the jump.

THE 8th Hull International Short Film Festival - Glimmer - gets underway on the 19th of April (until the 25th) and includes a look at the work of Jeff Keen, a retrospective of a 14-year-old filmmaker and the UK festival premiere of the Werner Herzog narrated Plastic Bag. While I wonder if it is the same plastic bag who made an unforgettable screen debut in American Beauty, you can check out the full line up of the festival online at www.hullfilm.co.uk. Famous for their pay-what-you-want entry fee - introduced by fest director (and Netribution's DVD editor) Laurence Boyce - key competitions include the Anthony Minghella Award for Best International and Best UK Short. This year for the first time the event is run in association with the University of Hull.

With the majority of films in competition being screened for the first time in the UK, this will be a chance to be the first to check out some of the great talents working in short films. Highlights include Curtains, a dark but comedic UK film that marks the co-directorial debut of Julian ‘The Mighty Boosh’ Barratt, and the UK Premiere of Plastic Bag, an elegiac film about the life of a plastic bag with narration from legendary film director Werner Herzog (see below in mini). The competitions will be judged by a jury of industry professionals, including scriptwriter Dominic Minghella who will oversee the award named in memory of his brother with prizes of £500 and £1000. Other competitions including the GLIMMER Award for Best Yorkshire Short, with a prize of £250 sponsored by the Hull School of Art and Design, and the GLIMMER Award for Best Hull Short, with a prize of £500 sponsored by Hull City Council.