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…

2006 was certainly a year of trailer mashups. To quote the Misshaken Pictures' Mashifesto: "As our collective history burrows deeper into the digital coalface we begin to see it recombined, re-imagined, re-invented and e-rased. Heirachies of media code are becoming silly putty in the hands of the majority and the global mirror increases at an unprecedented rate, a miasma of Id…

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…

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…

So I finally hit the big time and moved up a decimal place in my daily Web Monetization payouts. As I mentioned last month I've added Web Monetization here and a few other sites (FundYourFilm.com, Visuali.st – my work site, and screen.is). After a daily trickle of a penny or two, I got an email on the 15th "You received 1.77612 XRP from Interledger Network", which based on today's price of the c…

The man who once forced to Klaus Kinski to take direction at gun point has been shot at during an interview with the BBC. The bizara incident is reported on the excellent cinematical.net Werner Herzog shot with air rifle during interviewPosted Feb 8th 2006 11:02PM by Jay Allen Filed under: Documentary Just in case you haven't gotten your quota of movie-related bizarre today, here's one…

Peter Finch in Network tells it how it is, remixed by videobeats/pixm.

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…

Sheffield Documentary Film Festival wound up on Sunday, with a brief interlude before the Scottish Documentary Film Institute hosts the Edinburgh Pitch on Tuesday and prior to the Edinburgh Film Festival officially kicking off on Wednesday. Filmtastic week. As was probably part of the rational to shift Sheffield to June (which it has wanted to do for almost 4 years), many of the commissioners who…

As the season finally closes in on us, for those tired of the same old re-runs on TV or wanting to avoid the family warzone of the living room and watch TV on a computer under your bed - or better still are looking for films to share during the post-dinner web video show-off - I've pulled together some of our favorites of the year. In the first bundle I've focussed on anima…

 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…

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…

So that's it then, four years to the day almost, since issue 99 went out, so it's been a while.With this new architecture it has not been too bad. Not a lot of midniht oil burning, although Nic looks to be a little jet-lagged when it gets to tea-time.There's no chance of Netribution losing its non-London centricity either, since our cotributors are well spread from the Smoke to the Shetland Islan…

  Sunflower3 - from vimeo's danLinfield

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…

Providing a write up for the Edinburgh Film Festival 2011, which came to a close yesterday, is not straightforward for me – Edinburgh is my adopted home of 28 years, and taking pleasure and pride in its cultural events is part of why it’s a great city to live in. But whether or not we wanted it, press coverage prior to the festival launch on 15th June was sharp, even nippy: the…

  21 Minute Film School Have you ever had a desire to make a movie? If so, set 21 minutes of your hectic life aside and read on!        1. The Idea for a film  Ever have a great idea for a movie? Sit down and see if you can decide which character’s eyes we see the story from (the point of view aka P.O.V.) This is likely the main…

  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…

If the 80's were epitomised by the Action film and the 90's were the domain of the more thoughtful independent film, then the early 21st century could easily come to be defined by the dominance of the comic strip adaptation. Ever since 'X-Men' and 'Spider-Man' hit the cinemas, Hollywood has been desperately trying to find the Next Big Thing. Even multi-award winning directors like Sam Mendes and…

  How much do movie stars contribute to box office success? Harvard Business School professor Anita Elberse researched the notion of "star power" to better understand how A-list players contribute to Hollywood's bottom line.   We can all understand at some level that stars in the worlds of film, sports, and even business create results. If you want big box offi…

It was an inspired idea – creating a feature around the ultimate fantasy of a girl from village India dreaming of Bollywood stardom and to fulfill it, running away with The Truck of Dreams, the mobile cinema that rumbles around the dirt roads that pass for off-the-beaten-track in rural India. It was a dream also for London-based director Arun Kumar, a first feature with global themes, financed a…

It has often been said that men age and women mature. However women, like wine, tend to mature in one of two ways. They either ripen into something full-flavoured, with lots of body and a myriad of intriguing flavours or they turn onto an unpleasant, acidic vinegar. It's further said that there are no good parts in Hollywood for the older woman. Well, one person would take issue with that. She's…

  In the rush and work pressures surrounding filmmaking, it's all too easy to overlook some essentials, but these are often the factors that can lift a film from the mundane level to the exceptional. James MacGregor's notes reveal some of the secrets of real film craft.....   Storytelling on Screen Your focus is on telling the story, not just o…

Open source is one of those phrases that gets thrown around, from the Cabinet Office now asking for it in government ICT contracts, to cyber-libertarians saying it heralds the start of a post-capitalist age. But what does it actually mean? And given how much of the for-profit digital world depends on open source - from Android phones to the Safari browser, Facebook’s servers to YouTube’s interfac…