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Random selection…
Anyone
trying to gain employment in the Britain's film industry knows how hard
it can be getting a foot in the door. Three years at film school and
all the enthusiasm and determination in the world still can't guarantee
you a job in an industry that measures success in terms of who you have
worked with and what films you have worked on. Here's a story that
shows how one aspiri…
The first London Brazilian Film Festival hit town last week with the warm and vocal audience participation of the city's expat community, and a couple of cinematic gems.
You get the sense that organizers ‘Inffinifo' want to express that there is so much more to Brazil, and it's cinema, than the sex, violence and poverty stereotypes reinforced by its big hits over recent years. However, and despi…
Aimed at first time visitors, Shizana Arshad and Laura Horowitz at 6 Degrees Film have put together a Cannes Guide
containing information on the festival itself, how to submit your film
and obtain accreditation along with useful numbers and info...
What do you need to know about
attending the Cannes Film Festival? What should you expect? Who gets
accreditation? Find out the answers to…
Tom Swanston Reports from the NORDIC CO-PRODUCTION FORUM
Haugesund, Norway 21-23 August 2006
This year the beautiful coastal town of Haugesund, Norway was host to the first ever Nordic Co-Production Forum, held from 21st to 23rd August. The town is situated on a long sea inlet in the South West of the country, a 45-minute flight from Oslo.
The…
Writer Simon Rose on Getting His Story to the Big Screen
I can't be the only writer who, after sitting through umpteen appalling movies, has thought, "Surely I can do better." By 1994, I was itching to write a screenplay, but a subject eluded me. Then I heard about Graeme Obree. This down-at-heel Scot built a revolutionary bicycle from scrap and washing- machi…
Come in come in. Is anyone there?Just lost a whole page of data when I went to upload it. PHUT. gone, finito, marrungad, kaputo. I was logged in, but when the upload completed it told me I could not have access to that page without being registered and shuit me out! And my data went west, wasting a whiole precious hour of work Oh boy am, I not nice to know at the moment..... I have some…
the horror film franchise is still surprisingly resilient and not really showing signs of slowing (some would say that the current incarnation has outstayed it's welcome). The question i ask is if there is space for a real rough and ready old school horror film that does what it says on the tin? The last good horror for me was Outpost. It didn't make you think too much and had a great genre story…
The first time. I can never forget that. Shunted to the outskirts of
town to watch Robert LePage juggle love and war in his heartstopping
multimedia devised play the Seven Streams of the River Ota,
which would eventually run at 7 hours by the time I last saw it at the
National, years later. Stuart Lee and Richard Herring in pre Jerry
Springer the Opera days chumming with Jenny Eclair…
Amateur: barely a few letters from Auteur - but what, in our social media world, is the difference? If there was a dividing line of the 51st Krakow Film Festival, it was between the crowed-sourced YouTube world of Life in a Day and the personal journeys of documakers turning their lives and experiences into art. Less a debate between high and low art, as between the home movie and the knowingly…
Earlier this week I was kindly invited to see the re-opening of Alan Bennett's The History Boys at the Wyndham's Theatre. It was a case of a friend of mine having to go along for a national daily newspaper to get a morsel of something (something, anything, a crumb of gossip, just get someone to say something, anything) to put in their diary pages the following day. The m…
Actor and documentary-maker Kenneth Griffith has died at the age of 84.
He was born in Tenby, Pembrokeshire and had been a familiar face on TV and cinema screens since the 1940s, including the 1960's cult TV hit, The Prisoner.
Griffith, who died at his London home, also made often controversial films on such subjects as the Boer War - on which he was an expert - an…
The
only people who truly know how much blood sweat and tears go into the
making of a feature length movie are those who have done it themselves.
The effort required is also in indirect proportion to the size of the
budget - the smaller the budget the greater will be the effort
required.
This particular story is that of Neil Oseman
("Hereford's Stephen Speilberg…
Writer, actor, director, conscientious objector, uncompromising activist and - by all accounts - much loved and utterly decent person, Harold Pinter was not just a great contributor to our times, but a real inspiration. In the below video he talks about art, truth, politics and the Iraq war, as he accepted the Nobel Prize for Literatrue in 2005.
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"the…
Hallam Foe, Edinburgh 2000, Protagonist, Rataouille & Planet B-Boy
"You know, everytime someone says they don't believe in cinema, someone, somewhere makes a sequel to a bad movie."
I'm slammed head first into multiplex A&E. Pulse falling, blood pressure dropping fast. I don't believe in anything any more. A sugar rush of Butterkist popcorn barely gets me into the trailers…
A film Spike Jonze made after spendning a day with presidential
candidate Al Gore in 2000 has just been released online.. given that
Gore lost the election to only 500 votes, one wonders what impact this
could have had on the election - and in turn the world today - had it
been shown.
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How Do I Sell My Film Part One - DEMOGRAPHICS
Netribution and film distributors WYSIWYG have joined forces to present on-line WYSIWYG's essential Guide to Film Distribution.
We're both interested in building a strong industry for independent filmmakers. This means creating films that people want to see and buy. It does not mean sacrificing creative integrity, but it means business. To do the b…
I would like to say: when was the last time you gave antibiotics to a whale that had had no prior contact with humans and had swum to chelsea and was obviously a little stressed - and who doesn't get stressed in chelsea? when was the last time you did that? Never? Well why did you think now was the time to run an experiment? It's not like this whale shouldn't have had access to the best poss…
'Stay drunk on writing so reality cannot destroy you'
Ray Bradbury
Dear Tom,
It has been a while. I forget whose turn it is, but for sake of ease I shall both ask and answer my own question - a simple one.
Where am I?
It is a device, more than a question, to uncork my tongue as I sit here, in Paris's Gare De Lyon. Life shakes its stuff around me, and I shudder inside with the wearines…
I'll never forget watching Truly Madly Deeply as a kid, a film I hold responsible for a crush on cellists (Altman's Shortcuts also playing a part). Anthony Minghella did much more besides making deeply heartfelt and tender films - from chairing the BFI to Grange Hill, Inspector Morse and promoting the family ice cream business on the Isle of Wight. All thoughts to Hannah, Max, Carolyn and the res…
We were chatting the other night about how the Death
Star, for all its evil genius as a total killing machine, was really badly
designed. I mean from a defensive point of view – a huge open port,
with no gun turrets inside, leading to a big self destruct button. And Darth, despite all his Jedi training, is a pretty lousy pursuer of Luke.
So we wondered if, at the end of Episode 3…
Photographer
and writer Julian Richards wanted to make a documentary film and had a
rare opportunity to study and film Tuareg nomads of Mali in
Saharan Africa. He readliy agreed to share some of his experience with
us. With The Nomads is an intimate, unromantic portrait of the Tuareg
herders of the Sahara Desert and asks: Can they survive the 21st
Century?
Below you will…
Some very important occasions in your life only comes ones and that's all. Such happening like your wedding, high school graduation party, a trip to a far country or an abnormal happening that you happen to witness are things you will never love to forget. One important thing that is of great important to help you record such occasions is a camera.
Now, with a camera in hand, the next thing that…
Owen Thomas the producer (and now distributor) of the UK's first DV feature, the acclaimed One Life Stand, directed by May Miles Thomas, offers advice from his foray into DVD distribution on How To Sell Your Film (Not Your Soul)
Six years ago everyone was talking DIY filmmaking - how digital tools would revol…
The beautiful music of Elgar could be heard amongst scrap metal, bin bags and shrieking gulls yesterday as players from the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra played a recital in their most unusual venue ever - a London rubbish dump.
The special concert was held to promote the new Channel 4 series
Dumped, which starts on Sunday night (Sept 2nd, 9.00pm) and sees elev…