When I look through my adult life so far there are a few constants - the love of family and some good friends - yet the most regular rhythm, the most dependable refrain is that of change and disruption, of uncertainty. One thing, though, holds true through all of that, and it’s odd that I only seem to recognise it now. When I enter the quiet dark hall of a cinema, arms laden with sugar or beer perhaps; when I find a seat as centrally as possible, ideally with no-one in front of me… as the lights dim, my heart pounds a little as if on a plane about to take off. And as the screen starts to glow, as another world emerges to seduce me, my day’s problems begin to fall from me like a man dropping his clothes before he jumps in the sea.

It is strange that it has taken me so long to articulate this - not just in web text - but in my mind too. The distractions of the day, the worries and anxieties and frustrations about this abuse of corporate or government power, or that slight from someone dear, may be eased a little through meditation, sometimes a lot through a great book, but none for me so totally as through a good film in a darkened space. Even a mediocre one. These last few days my worries have been transformed into something hopeful through the brilliant yet McBlockbuster Wreck It Ralph, the visceral if hackneyed Oblivion, and then the powerful epic Midnight’s Children. Imperfection is not a problem, I seek just a voyage to a convincing new world, and people I can pin my internal struggles to, and reason to think much bigger than my own worries for a while.

Cinema feels like a lover I’ve depended on for as long as I can remember, but too rarely stop to say thank you, to recognise its wisdom and power. And this in turn reminds me that although Netribution is mostly tumbleweed, dust and spam links now, it reflected my excitement at where cinema will travel to next, in a connected world of ever cheaper kit and decentralised distribution.

The last thing I wrote on this site was nearly two years ago. I was a keen digital cinema entrepreneur taking the lessons from Shooting People and self-distributing the funding book into ventures new. And then my sister died after a brutal battle with cancer - and as I started to get over that, a friend killed herself. And I couldn’t talk about it here, indeed I still don’t really feel skilled enough. So I said nothing, but begun to question almost everything, Our current media space helped neither of them, while the superfast hyperconnected ad-driven pervasive digital frenzy that’s replacing it seems even worse equipped. While overflowing with ideas and research projects and possible new businesses, I floundered, unsure what would kind of media world would have been better for them. And I still don’t really know how to get to that, save for the fact that a good film can be as healing as a medicine, a great story as powerful as a hug or good conversation. 

So, dear lover cinema, forgive me my unfaithfulness, my absence and neglect. You’ve been there for me when others haven’t. You’ve made me mad and struck me sane. You’ve shaped so many of my views - often misguidedly and with the values of one race, class and gender - but also most regularly with a reminder that what makes me human and hurt, makes everyone human and hurt - it’s shared by us all. Thank you. Let’s begin again.

Deadline: Tuesday 30 April 2013

Festival: The Corn Exchange, Brighton Dome

Sunday 17 – Tuesday 19 November 2013

The 6th international festival of short films made by people with learning disabilities invites submissions for the 2013 festival.

Oska Bright is unique. It is the first and only festival managed and promoted by learning disabled artists as a showcase for their creativity and skill as film-makers. Submitted films are selected by a panel and there is a variety of categories for which awards are offered, including development bursaries. There are networking opportunities over the three day event, projections onto the outside of the venue and it culminates in a lively awards ceremony.

Exeter Phoenix Digital is launching three new Short Film Commission schemes for 2013. We are looking for proposals to shoot short, digital format films of 5-12 minutes duration. Films must be based on an original script or treatment but can be of any genre and are to be filmed by September 2013.

Exeter Phoenix Digital will award successful proposals a commission of £500, which can be used towards the film making process.

THE COMMISSIONS:

2013 DEVON SHORT FILM COMMISSIONS

Proposals are invited from individuals and groups who reside in Devon, UK and we actively encourage applications from students and first time filmmakers, as well as those with previous experience.

How to apply
Submissions are invited from Monday 3 December
Closing date – Friday 15 Feb 2013

All applications must be submitted using our online application process.
Download guidelines >>
Online application form >> 

2013 NATIONAL SHORT FILM COMMISSION

Proposals are invited from individuals and groups who reside in the UK (England, Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland) and we actively encourage applications from students and first time filmmakers, as well as those with previous experience.

How to apply
Submissions are invited from Monday 3 December
Closing date – Friday 15 Feb 2013

All applications must be submitted using our online application process.
Download guidelines >>
Online application form >> 

2013 CROWD FUNDED COMMISSION

The 2013 Crowd Funder Short film Commission will be a match fund award of £500 on the condition that the applicant can raise equal funds through Crowdfunder.co.uk. The applicant will be expected to create their own online campaign to raise funds of up to or exceeding £500.

How to apply

Submissions are invited from Monday 3 December.
Closing date – Friday 15 Feb 2013
All applications must be submitted using our online application process.

Download guidelines >>
Download tips to Crowd Funding >>
Online application form >>

Are you made of the ‘write’ stuff? a youth film academy has started its search for screenplays to be made into full length feature films next year.

The Co-operative British Youth Film Academy gives 14-25 year-olds unique experiences of the movie industry and is seeking new scripts or, screenplays of classics, for next summer’s filming schedule.

It is backed by The Co-operative Group as part of its commitment to inspiring young people and, this year, it shot four movies at film-making summer camps which combine professionals from film and education to mentor students and offer everything from acting to make-up and camera through to post-production.

When you’re deciding what film releases you want to see this autumn, don’t forget to find out what indie films are being shown at your local cinema. Cineworld has always been a solid supporter of indie films and has several of them on offer over the next few months.

Showing this month in Cineworld theatres is the indie film Ruby Sparks. Written by actress Zoe Kazan, who also plays the character Ruby, this is a story about a struggling writer who brings his fantasy woman to life.

The 56th BFI London Film Festival will open tonight with Frankenweenie, a stop-motion take on the Frankenstein story, directed by Tim Burton. It will close on 21st October with Great Expectations, starring Burton's partner, Helena Bonham Carter.

The Festival has a new director, Clare Stewart, who's shaken things up a bit. Here's what she has to say about the next 11 days:

Dead pan and wry are often traits associated with the national character of Edinburgh International Film Festival’s own natives, the Scots. So it’s intriguing to witness Argentinian and Greek directors – Ana Katz and Filippos Tsitos respectively - tackling family drama or existential inevitability in a dry-as-a-bone manner. Whether Argentinians or Greeks are noted for irony is moot, but considering the economic histories of both, it’s probably fair to assume it takes more than mere irony to weather the social meltdown both are so brutally familiar with.

So any curiosity as to whether financial allegory might play a part in the stories of Tsitos’s Unfair World or Katz’s Los Marziano gave way as tales of moral mores and sibling rivalry unfolded in their unique ways.  Both possess humour at their accomplished cores, yet stand as sinewy, absorbing fables in their own right.

Los Marziano takes the trope of falling down unexplained holes to set up the absurdity of fraternal tension. Appearing in a golf course on the edge of oldest brother Luis’s country house garden, they establish the emotional topography of an estrangement with his younger brother Juan which has played out over a period of time never explicitly quantified - but it’s probably decades. Here are two men, who entering the third stage in their lives, are dealing with the legacy of well-worn family dynamics – the responsible, successful elder brother at odds with the hapless, genial younger who has remained financially in debt to him. Their sister brokers the physical and emotional gap between them and inevitably takes the brunt of both brothers’ inappropriate treatment. It’s a universal tale of the resentments and communication issues that beset any family and it’s a beautifully scripted and shot take on a theme that often prefers high drama and histrionics. This is a film that takes its time to tell the story by letting the men’s foibles and increasingly extreme ‘accidents’ develop the narrative. Katz’s film is smart, affectionate and funny, but wears its layers lightly whilst revealing the psychological cul-de-sacs of sibling rivalry.

Power, Corruption and Laughs. This was Danish director/protagonist Mads Brugger’s route through the failed state chaos that reigns in the Central African Republic in his documentary satire The Ambassador, premiering in the UK at Edinburgh International Film Festival this week. Tackling deadly serious subjects that involve diplomatic immunity, old colonial interference and blood diamonds dredges up images of dry investigative journalism. Brugger, instead, enters terrain that feels like the hard-boiled world of a noirish thriller but does so with arch irony as the means of keeping his audience on board his extreme and potentially calamitous journey into central Africa’s shady ‘business’ domain.

"less the territory of doc and more that of a Michael Mann thriller where an opaque network of men and meetings dance delicately and smilingly around ‘envelopes of happiness’"

Brugger adopts and acts the persona of international businessman, Mr. Cortzen, buying a Liberian diplomatic passport and throwing money before him as the means to grease his way to contacts, meetings and opportunities that are closed to him without his ‘diplomatic’ status.  (Where did he get all that money to so convincingly play his part?) And this status can lead him to the ultimate prize – the ability to take diamonds illegally out of CAR. This netherworld of fraudulent old-world diplomacy and glad-handing African ministers does what a good doc should: it allows us to understand the culture of a place, a situation - especially those only ever news worthy through atrocity or disaster. It is illuminating in shining a light on the twilight dealings only ever reaching our ears in the form of failed coups and imprisoned mercenaries. It is a world of characters and situations so extreme, it almost seems beyond parody.

Brugger’s odyssey is less the territory of doc and more that of a Michael Mann thriller where an opaque network of men and meetings dance delicately and smilingly around ‘envelopes of happiness’ and crazy contractual clauses. These are the paths trodden of Mark Thatcher and Simon Mann, or ex-French Legionnaires and ex-security men who will broker you diplomatic status and ergo the capacity to get over borders with bags full of unchecked diamonds. Brugger paddles through some pretty hot water and his cojones can only be admired when one considers that the wrong step in the merry dance could, as he is warned, have him found dead in a ditch.

Brugger succeeds for the most part in maintaining the wry tone that exposes the bungs, ad hoc legalities and trenchant opportunism that are the day-to-day realities of this African country. However, it oversteps satire in fusing his character’s neo-colonialism/racism and the discrimination of fellow Africans in relation to CAR’s Pygmy tribespeople. Brugger’s impostor-diplomat may be in character dancing piss-takingly with drunk Pygmies - and who knows if this is the behaviour these diplomat-businessmen generally display - but without first hand contribution from these peoples who take the brunt of this disastrous world and are the butt of Brugger’s scams, it makes for queasy viewing, adding another layer of exploitation to what they have already sustained in this violent land.

Brugger’s film isn’t flawless and his mission doesn’t get him the grand coup de commerce he may have been after, but it gets the viewer an extraordinary and satisfying insight into a world that few of us would dare go near. This is no fantasy of dodgy geezers and lurking murder. This is the real deal. Or at least the real deal achieved via documentary deception and con.

With a new chair this year in the shape of Scotsman, Alex Graham, presiding over a delegate list now 2,500 in number and Aussie Heather Croall still proving to be an assured hand in the Director’s role, Sheffield Doc/Fest 2012 is still on a steady and upward trajectory. Funding and making docs is tough territory but in these financial anni horribili the festival itself succeeded in not only keeping funders on board but even bringing ITV back into the supportive fold. 

Flavours and impressions from Sheffield run aneclectic gamut, from moshing to a Finnish punk band whose members have learning disabilities (main players from The Punk Syndrome; directors, Jukka Kärkkäien and JP Passi) to a standing ovation for the buzz film of the week, 5 Broken Cameras (directed by Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi). Sheffield takes your head and heart through dizzying territory, reminding you that documentary can confound as well as meet expectations given the right circumstances, people and ethos.

Sheffield had two openers this year, neither piggy-backing on already established popularity as arguably the Joan Rivers and Morgan Spurlock choices over the last two years might attest to. The first, Inspiration Award recipient Penny Woolcock’s From the Sea to the Land Beyond, is a piece made specifically for Sheffield and partnered with the BBC, Arts Council England and the BFI. The result was a lovely 71-minute montage of archive footage, some of it a hundred years old, backed by live music from British Sea Power. Part of the BBC/Arts Council of England’s The Space project (thespace.org/items/e00009su), it was streamed live and is now viewable on line. It was a moving and revealing portrait of British life chronologically arranged from Edwardian blokes swimming in the sea with top hats on, to hardy holidaymakers facing storm force winds and crashing rain screeching, ‘I HATE Blackpool’. 

 The musical theme continued with the opening film, Searching for Sugar Man, one of those docs with an extraordinary personal story that appears to be the niche speciality of independent productions, and director Malik Bendjelloul’s first feature. Detailed description risks a massive spoiler, but in the vein of all good character-led work, it also gives us insight into political and social situations remaining under the radar in sweeping histories or current affairs. In this case, a perspective was given on the white community in South Africa in the early 70s who latched onto the music of Sixto Rodriguez – the protagonist in our film – as a conduit for forming their hopes for change in a society where media restriction was total and protest crackdown was fierce under PW Botha’s apartheid regime; no matter what the colour of your skin.

The Special Jury Award winner this year was Marina Abramovic: The Artist is Present. Director Michael Akers is a graduate in sculpture who was extremely sceptical about performance art, which may be a contributory factor to the success of his film. Abramovic, now 63, was, and still is, a performance artist who does not compromise, and her earlier work was often harrowing as she subjected her body to brutal intervention; cutting, flagellating, drugging - all in the name of art. Akers' film leads up to another physical and psychological tour de force: sitting for 7 hours a day in New York's Museum of Modern Art for 3 months in 2010 undertaking an interaction of the gaze with individual visitors. The emotional impact of Abramovic's presence is extraordinary to watch, and was an entirely unexpected outcome for the film: there is a shamanic quality to her, and Akers - through specific camera decisions - succeeded in illustrating the charisma and force of her personality. His decision to do more than 'document' an artwork, which would have been the traditional art world approach, arguably broadened and deepened Abramovic's work: the film itself a part of The Artist is Present exhibition and performance at MoMA. 

5 Broken Cameras took us explicitly into troubled contemporary territory where brutal oppression still reigns. A collaboration between a Palestinian and an Israeli may suggest an idealistic reaching across the divides, but as co-directors Emad Burnat and Guy Davidi explained, the decision was based on mutual creative instincts. The strategy to interweave Bil’in villager Burnat’s family situation into a broader political tale of Israeli militarization and settlement impact was an attempt to create identification rather than provocation for Israel’s mainstream population - and it’s a powerful device for a deeply emotional experience for the viewer. Davidi, an Israeli Tel Aviv citizen, cited the denial of his fellow nationals in relation to the Palestinian situation. Neither director had grand hopes about the task ahead of them, but Burnat’s compulsive filming was his means of protecting his community during confrontations and healing the scabrous wounds both physical and psychological inflicted by land-grabbing and murderous occupation. He said there is no healing if situations are forgotten.