Written by Symphonetix | 25 April 2009 | in news - Film

WHITBY COLISEUM (contact tel: 01947 825000 - email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

Friday 22^nd May 2009, 7.30pm

Fifth in the monthly series of locally made short-films, "WHITBY IN SHORTS[5]" follows the hugely successful previous events with another entertaining and diverting programme, plus a special guest appearance of Dominic Windram's back-projection poetic performance piece "Artificial Eden". (Visit www.whitby-in-shorts.org.uk for further details).

If you have made a short film in the Whitby/NYM/Esk Valley/Cleveland region, and would like to see it screened at "WHITBY IN SHORTS", please contact the organisers through the website.

We are delighted to announce that the "Whitby in Shorts" International Short-Film Festival(WiSiS-FF, pronounced "wississiffi") will be taking place from 5^th to 13^th September this year. Full details on the website. Please give us your support and join us there!

Written by Symphonetix | 29 March 2009 | in news - Film

At WHITBY COLISEUM (contact tel: 01947 825000 - email: This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it )

Friday 17^th April 2009, 7.30pm
£5, Under18s £2.50

Fourth in the monthly series of locally made short-films, "WHITBY IN SHORTS[4]" follows the hugely successful previous events with another excellent and engaging programme. (Visit www.whitby-in-shorts.org.uk for further details.

Written by biju viswanath | 14 November 2008 | in news - Film

"Marathon displays the resolve, discipline and courage of two human beings running for their lives, qualities that can sustain us all in life's marathon."

Acclaimed director, Biju Viswanath, featured previously here on Netribution, writes in with news of his adaptation of Richard Harteis' non-fiction work, Marathon. With a screenplay by Celia de Fréine, Marathon is a tale of courage, endurance, and finally, the triumph of love.

Marathon explores the relationship between Richard Harteis and William Meredith, former US Poet Laureate and winner of every major American award for poetry including the 1988 Pulitzer Prize. 

In the 17th year of their friendship, William sustains a debilitating stroke. Richard stands by his partner, fighting for the right to care for him, despite the inevitable restrictions on his own life, and against the wishes of William's family. Though the path they have chosen is not an easy one, their love and compassion see them through days of illness, therapy, and healing.

 

Written by publicist Rachel Devenport | 29 September 2008 | in news - Film

From Rachel Devenport:

A new viral from the makers of British gangster film Daylight Robbery has been launched online  at www.70millionquid.co.uk

The cast and crew of the film teamed up with creative digital agency Silence to produce a personalised short which asks for viewers to sign up their friends to take part in the criminal gangs' next bank job. 

Written by Nic Wistreich | 13 February 2008 | in news - Film

So I arrived in Mumbai on the coldest day there in 46 years. It gave me a brief sense of bravado, strutting around saying, 'but it's scorching' as locals shivered in the 13 C dusk. The strutting didn't last long after I left my passport in one of the city's 55,000 taxis. Five hours and 32km later it turns up, making my first day feel at once both the unluckiest and most fortunate.

Actually the taxi ride to the airport (which I took three times that day) makes it clear just how lucky I am. Two weeks on, from the seclusion of a Goan beach I have become used to it, but still the poverty makes anything I've seen before pale into insignificance. Words do little justice, while filming seems gawkish, but the single image of a child, perhaps two years old, sitting in its own excrement while eating from the pavement, just opposite the gothic grandeur of CST, Asia's busiest train station, is forever burnt in my mind. In many ways it feels like the rest of the trip is about figuring out what I can do.

In the meantime, here's some of the film and culture news I've noticed since I've been here.

Some encouraging news, first off, with the announcement that Greg 'BBC Superstar' Dyke is to take over from Anthoney MInghella as chair at the BFI. Why so good, other than his general energy and inspiring leadership, you ask? Well, at the BBC he initiated a project - the Creative Archive - which sought to put the full BBC archive of programmes, news, audio and so forth online and into the hands of the British public (who had funded them) to use for any non-commercial purpose. Obviously the idea terrified the media majors - it would have made the BBC the biggest provider of free quality video in the world, and perhaps triggered a creative renaissance as people started rediscovering, remixing and reworking long forgotten gems. One conspiratorial bod suggested to me that this was the real reason it was so easy for him to be forced out of the job , he was forced out of the job at the BBC. Either way, after leaving, the project was mothballed, but it seems he is now to redirect that energy onto the BFI archive, one he describes as the best in the world. It couldn't have come at a better time, with a recent 25m (can't find the pound sign) government investment into the archive , offering great hope for putting . Having just finished the first phase of an online archive project for Contemporary Films (the UK's longest running indie distributor), and seen how much Brewster Kahle has achieved with Archive.org on donations alone to suggest that the money would amply get the public domain parts of the archive online, and perhaps cover rights clearances on some of the rest as well. Film students, VJs, experimental artists, researchers, documentarians... watch this space.

Following on from the double whammy death blow of the Arts Council's slashing of support for hundreds of essential small theatres, galleries, festivals and arts organisations, and the possibly closure of the British Council's arts departments -  comes the (brilliant) news that the Department of Children Schools and Families wants young people to receive five hours of quality cultural experiences a week. They will also be encouraged to look at creative careers . My work with TAG Theatre proved to me how positive the impact of live arts could be on young people, and it's great that the government has finally recognised this. But the plans - which will see children in 10 pilot areas taken to galleries, theatres and museums, runs so contrarily to the Arts Council's catastrophic actions where acclaimed theatre in education groups like London Bubble have had their funding 100% cut and face closure. Harrogate Theatre, where I saw countless breathtaking plays as a child, not to mention acted and directed there, has had its 400k grant slashed to 150k , threatening all in-house shows. 

And 'the Strike' finally ended, just in time for the Oscars, after an astonishingly successful and impacting 100 days . From across the pond it was really something to see Letterman and Leno forced off the air by strikers, in the world capital of capitalism (tho both were early pioneers with the Comedy Store strikes in '79). Writers voted overwhelmingly (92.5%) in favour of the deal which will see a WGA writer of any high-budget programme earning around $1400 - $1600 a year for each ad-supported streamed webisode (up from nil). High budget is defined as costing more than the lower of $15,000 a minute, $300,000 an episode or $500,000 a series.

And Spielberg's quit the Chinese Olympics as adviser in protest over Chinese influence (or lack of it) in Darfur. It's refreshing to see some Hollywood action over likely ethnic cleansing during the atrocity rather than many years later -  Rwanda's horrors took place around the same time that Schindler's List was released, Sudan's problems began around the time that Hotel Rwanda came out. 

What else? Well you probably know about the French coup d'etat at the BAFTAs (I'm a traveller now, so use emoticons in otherwise polite conversation), and Brazil taking the Golden Bear at Berlin. The media could be on the brink of acting like adults over Britney , Film London has a fantastic-looking new entrant scheme , the BBC is joining iTunes and the last screening at Swansea's La Charrette cinema will be the world premiere of Danny Boyle's segment of the shelved Alien Love Triangle .

Someone else trekking to India in recent days was David Lynch, for the funeral of Transcendental Meditation founder, the Maharishi. Best known for influencing western pop music forever following his brief training of The Beatles in Transcendental Meditation around the White Album period, the Maharishi was a controversial figure, amassing millions as eastern philosophy and practices first began to be explored and embraced by the west.

Which reminds me, I'm a few steps from sun, sand and sea, and instead hunch over this machine embedding hyper-links like a junkie. Oh well, old habits die hard, I guess.

Written by Nic Wistreich | 07 November 2007 | in news - Film

Open is the new, erm, closed  as Google figure the only way into two huge markets they currently aren't leader in - mobile phones and social networks -  is through mass collaboration. Android, launched this week, is a consortium of mobile phone companies working to create an open operating system for phones based on Linux, that would be offered freely and be easy to develop for. Playing on the paranoia (paranoid android?) in the industry that Apple's iPod halo may garrote the world's biggest consumer entertainment platform, with some 3bn mobile phones worldwide against 1.5bn TVs and 1bn web connections, Android hope to have a phone ready for the end of next year. Market leaders Symbian and Microsoft have - predictably - sneered in disgust.

Prior to this long awaited news, Google also announced a new consortium of Every Social Network Except Facebook to create a common application programming interface (API - ie building blocks for programmes) for people to develop a single application that will work on Every Social Network Except Facebook pages. This time the criticism came from the far more respected source of Tim O'Reilly (who coined the phrase web 2.0 amongst countless other achievements), who says the system doesn't go far enough, not allowing, for instance, a MySpace user to message someone on Linked-In. Instead he wishes for the open social network operating system, as hinted at by Brad Fitzpatrick, and David Recordon's ruminations on the 'social graph' and how it needs to be free (strongly recommended read if you are interested in this area).

OK. No more geek talk, I promise. Festival submission deadlines on the horizon. There's the 6th Hull International Short Film Festival, the first from Laurence Boyce - with a top prize of £1000. More info from their site. The European Documentary Network - who have just launched a new documentary event calendar, meanwhile, have set December 3rd as the deadline for their next event - DocsBarcelona 2008.

Ever noticed that most film contests these days involve time - either 48 hours or 60 seconds? Well BAFTA's 60 seconds film contest is back - with the winning chance of getting shown during next year's ceremony. Speaking of ceremonies, the 51st London Film Festival rewarded Persepolis, Brick Lane's Sarah Gavron, Andrey Pauonov's The Mosquito Problem and Other Stories (right) and Joanna Hogg for Unrelated. The Satyajit Ray award went to Cristian Nemescu's California Dreamin'.

London and Edinburgh film festivals meanwhile are to share £1.25m a year from the UK Film Council over the next three years, supposedly Edinburgh's pay-off for obeying the UK Film Council's highly unpopular demands for the festival to move to June. Another eight festivals will get just £250,000 a year to share between them. Other fests on the horizon include Leeds International Film Festival, and the Munich International Festival of Film Schools, running November 17-24. 

Copyright now, and a non-profit Candian site, the International Music Score Library Project - which hosted the biggest free collection of sheet music anywhere - has been forced to go offline after Universal Edition, a German company, argued that while all the scores hosted were in the public domain in Canada, for some European visitors to the site some of them were not. The part-time student running the site, unable to risk major litigation, pulled the site down. Got to love lawyers, hey? On the subject of crazy laws, GMTV has just published a list of the top ten weirdest laws, including the law that in the UK a pregnant woman can legally relieve herself anywhere she wants, including in a policeman's helmet. But I digress...

Written by Nic Wistreich | 27 September 2007 | in news - Film

Virgin Mobile Australia pulled over 100 Creative Commons images off Flickr to use in an advertising campaign without contacting and asking the photographers or subjects. One teenage subject found a photo of herself on a bus-stop, and has now been advised to sue both Virgin and the Creative Commons Corporation. A thread on Flickr sees her discover that she was 'face ripped'... "hey that's me, no joke.. I think I'm being insulted". Virgin argues that the attribution-only license puts them firmly within their rights, the photographer, however, didn't understand the implications of the license. Netribution also uses Creative Commons attribution images from Flickr on our front page but we ensure that there are no recognisable people in the shot, and, well, we're not a multi-zillion dollar company. CC founder Laurence Lessig retorts here.

'Truth in Numbers: The Wikipedia Story' is currently in production, and will be the first feature doc to explore the Wikipedia phenomena. True to wiki-culture, it's being produced collaboratively, and anyone can contribute. The production is also crowdsourcing the budget, with $50 or more getting the funder a DVD and their name in the credits, and over $50,000 raised to date. (from Cinematech).

Meanwhile, also on the wiki front, New Zealand police have invited the public to rewrite one of the key policing laws online on a wiki as it goes out for debate in one of the earliest genuine examples of so called politics 2.0. 

"The video cassette always had more value than the VCR that you shoved it into. Apple has been able to turn that model on its head." Edgar Bronfman Jr. Warner MusicTo help promote the release of the Darjeeling Limited, Fox Searchlight and director Wes Anderson are releasing a short film, Hotel Chevalier, for free on iTunes. Staring Natalie Portman, the film is 'a kind of prequel' to the feature, shot in 2005 before the script for Darjeeling was written.

Amazon has taken iTunes' lead to launch a music download store without DRM copy protection. Over 2 million tracks are available, including works from Universal and EMI. Warner Records (the fourth of the big quartet being Sony BMG), long hostile to DRM, has softened its tone in recent weeks. Warner's Edgar Bronfman Jr told investors that one problem for his industry is that consumers are more loyal to the iPod than to any particular artist. That means the industry's content must play on an Apple device - so either must use Apple's FairPlay (which means on sale through iTunes) or be DRM-free MP3s. "Never before in the history of content has the hardware been more valuable than the software," Bronfman said. "You think about the VCR or the video cassette -- the video cassette always had more value than the VCR that you shoved it into. Apple has been able to turn that model on its head." 

Anders Weberg, the Swedish video artist who releases his work on P2P networks, deleting the originals, has just released a new 45 minute  experimental non-linear film on filesharing networks, Transient (right). His first film Filter apparently "is still shared and seeded today one year later and that's amazing to think about. On 15/9 this year, exactly on the day that the first one was released I uploaded a second film" he told Netribution. The film and all the files used creating it were deleted the same day.

Halo 3 has shown its blockbuster movie teeth, raking in $170m in the first 24 hours on sale, equivalent to around 2.5 million units. 

A stunt performer has died on the set of the new Batman film in Surrey. Surrey Police and Health Safety Executive are investigating after a car hit a tree on Batman: The Dark Night.  

Martin Scorsese is to make a documentary on the life of George Harrison, according to Variety. The film will look at his spiritual journey, his music and film producing.   

Finally, showing films on your phone is sooo last week. Texas Instruments have developed a new phone with a built in video projector.  If you thought that guy on the bus using their phone to play full volume grime was annoying, just wait till they start projecting Crazy Frog The Movie.

Written by Suchandrika Chakrabarti | 04 September 2007 | in news - Film

Shane Meadows' This Is England, set in early 80s northern England among skinheads and National Front members, was released on DVD on Monday 3rd September.

  It won the UK FIlm Talent Award at the 2006 London Film Festival, as well as the British Independent Film Award for  Best Independent Film.

  The film's pitch-perfect rendition of an 80s northern town, along with its candid look at the politics and attitudes of the time, make it a riveting watch.

 

 

Written by Nic Wistreich | 07 August 2007 | in news - Film

A roundup of some of the latest news, events and funds doing the rounds at the moment

- YouTube, currently mourning the death of LonelyGirl15, is to start filtering out copyright content from September by comparing content to a database of digital 'fingerprints'. Questions abound about how a robot will recognise 'fair use', as well as the increasing number of situations where producers actively (and usually unofficially and anonymously) leak content to help with marketing, or support such redistribution for unpopular or new shows, such as with NBC's Weeds.

- The irrepresisble Terrence Doyle, who harks from the days of the much missed Peeping Toms (like Jan Dunn, Wendy Bevan Mogg, Clifford Thurlow, Netribution and, of course,  Dazzle's Dawn Sharpless, who ran it with Peter Smith) - has launched a new magazine for British films -  the aptly named and slick looking BritishFIlmMagazine.com. 

- The UK Film Council is awarding £500,000 to local cinemas with the Capital and Access Fund for Cinemas, and awards of up to 50% and £50k for improvement of facilities and disability access.  

- Ronald Harwood, the British screenwriter who won an Oscar for adapting the Pianist for Roman Polanski, and seems to pick up acclaim like my inbox collects spam (with scripts for Oliver Twist, The Dresser, Cannes 07 hit The Diving Bell and The Butterfly and the forthcoming, much anticipated, Love in the Time of Cholera) has brought out a book of interviews and advice on adapting for cinema. Edited by Evelyn Price and Guerilla Film's David Nicholas Wilkinson, when I saw an early draft last year, it looked set to become an essential edititon to the screenwriter's library. I was fortunate enough to interview Ronald a few years back for Guerilla's release of Taking Sides, and he is a true (and rare) gentleman of the film world.

- The four finalists for Warp X's female horror director scheme, Darklight, have been announced, and are Miranda Bowen, Corinna Faith, Smita Bhide and Juliet McKoen.

- Following the successs of investment in French film Tell No One (£110,000 awarded to help dist. Revolver double sites led to a box office haul of over £1m now), the latest awards to UKFC's Prints & Advertising fund include over £100k to  Laurent Tirard’s Molière and Oliver Dahan's La Vie En Rose. A full list of awards listed below, including £4,500 to the Blair-ribbing

- Red Planet have launched a new screenwriting competition, with a prize that includes £500, agency representation and a script commission. Stephen Fry sits on the judging panel.

- The Weinstein Company's global expansion continues apace, meanwhile, with launch of a $275m fund for Asian movies, to include a live action version of Mulan and a remake of the Seven Samarai. 

 

- Apple has rewritten its entry level iMovie 8, bundled with all Macs, with some pretty cool user interface innovations, tho it looks like the timeline has been ditched - with the aim of making it posible to cut a 5 minute sort in under half an hour. Headline feature is built in YouTube export, in a tighter relationship between Apple and Google, with Google AdSense now included in the website programe iWeb.

  - And finally, a new form of piracy, with the buzz on Michel Gondry's next pic, Be Kind, Rewind, so strong, that a shaky handheld video of its trailer, screened at Comic Con in the US, is currently doing the rounds for those unable to wait until the end of the week when it will appear online.

 

Written by NITC | 29 July 2007 | in news - Film

 

The low budget horror feature film ‘Nailed', from debut director Adrian O'Connell has wrapped in Northern Ireland. The script, financing and production for the film was assembled and completed in just under four weeks.

NAILED is a psycho-thriller about two criminals, fleeing from a drug sting, who break into a dilapidated home. Within the apparently empty home they find instead a man lying on a bed, covered in bandages, whose caretaker may have intentions that are less than honorable. All is not as it seems as things begin to go wrong for the thieves, bringing the supernatural and the horrific into play.