Protesters in Tottenham voicing their anger at the police shooting of Mark Duggan.
Five years after the death of Mark Duggan and the subsequent riots, many Londoners from black and minority ethnic communities still struggle to trust the police. The 2013 inquest into Duggan’s death at the hands of police found the shooting to be a ‘lawful killing’, despite many witnesses testifying Duggan had not been armed. A gun was found at the scene, but it bore none of Duggan’s prints, blood or DNA. An expert witness went as far as to testify it was “very difficult” to imagine the deceased throwing the gun to the spot where it was found, some 20 feet away, after he had been shot twice. Marcus Knox-Hooke and Kurtis Henville, two childhood friends of Duggan, were determined to find justice for him and the resulting documentary, The Hard Stop, explodes historical tensions between law enforcement and London’s black community. The film’s director George Amponsah reveals what East London said about the film, what divides Londoners, and how to protest.
How have Londoners responded to the film?
We screened it at the East End Film Festival in June and afterwards had a panel with two police officers. Emotions were high: feelings of sadness, feelings of anger and a sense of injustice. There were a lot of questions asking those officers how they felt the police might change some of the patterns of behaviour reflected in the film – the main pattern being a history of not being accountable when things go wrong.
Is there a clear dividing line between people open to Duggan’s story and the people who are not?
I don’t know. To be honest, I’m not trying to be evasive in saying this but I’m a filmmaker. What I know is films and trying to tell a story. Part of the motivation for making The Hard Stop was that I wanted to make a film that was about an important subject and about my home. I was born in London. I’m British. In many senses I’d be satisfied with the film as long as it is something that provokes debate and discussion. Because what’s important to me in some ways is that Martin Luther King quote that appears at the beginning of The Hard Stop: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” It’s just important for a debate and discussion to be had rather than for a significant amount of people to think their voice and opinion is not being heard, and is being discounted – so much so that they find themselves taking to the streets and getting involved in the kind of disturbance that we saw in Britain in 2011.
What advice would you give to young Londoners who want to carry on the conversation started with this film?
Try and get involved in things that are constructive and creative. Try to find a way of protesting where you’re getting your voice heard, where it can’t be discounted, and certainly in a way where you know you’re not going to be imprisoned or find yourself on the wrong side of the law.
The Cast of The Childhood of a Leader. Photograph: Tom Munro
Last month’s East End Film Festival premiered Brady Corbet’s chilling directorial debut, The Childhood of a Leader.
There is certainly a lot at play in this film, which is part political thriller, part psychoanalytic drama about how a fascist leader is created.
Set in 1918 in a quietly beautiful but bleak French village, the film imagines the life of the son of diplomat and aid to President Woodrow Wilson as his father negotiates the Treaty of Versailles.
While the characters’ interior lives remain mysterious, the tyrannical patriarch’s son Prescott has his lonely, cruel childhood laid bare.
The film stars the much-adored Twilight idol Robert Pattison, but critics have been left mesmerised by the brilliantly unsettling performance of ten-year-old Hackney-based actor Tom Sweet as the film’s leader in the making.
One might assume that Sweet had starred in a number of plays from a young age. As it happens, Childhood of a Leader is his first performance.
Even more surprisingly, the opportunity came about by chance. “I started acting when I was nine, it all happened really quickly – I was walking home from school with my parents one day, and I was just stopped and asked if I’d liked to audition for the film,” he explained.
Sweet’s role certainly isn’t an easy one. The film progresses through a number of increasingly disturbing ‘tantrums’ by the politician’s son, as he boils over under an austere, rigid home life.
Prescott doesn’t seem to gain any enjoyment out of antagonising the adults around him. He reacts with indifference to the recipients of his outbursts and his lack of emotional intensity appears far more believable than the usual ‘creepy child’ stock character rolled out in Hollywood.
Sweet and I were in agreement that Scott Walker’s shrill, orchestral score makes Childhood of A Leader truly fearsome. “I hadn’t watched any scary films before and I don’t like them that much but I’ve watched Childhood of a Leader four times and didn’t find it too bad! I suppose it definitely helps that I know it so well and understand the character. I remember being really frightened of the score when I watched it in Venice though – the music is amazing but so shocking”, he said.
It is clear that Prescott’s uncaring parents are to blame for his rebellion. Sweet admits that a number of scenes were difficult to film. The first scene he shot involved an especially violent altercation between himself and his onscreen father, but for Sweet, that’s all part of the fun. “Yeah, he’s definitely very mischievous! I think what I love most about acting is that I can be two totally different people, it’s the chance to step away from ordinary life for a bit and become someone else.”
While much of the critical attention to this film may be on Corbet’s debut as the director, the articulate, gifted Tom Sweet also provides much cause for excitement.
The cast of Alleycats. Photograph: Christina Solomons
The East End Film Festival got off to a start last month, with the world premiere of Ian Bonhote’s debut feature, Alleycats.
It begins with trendy bike courier Chris speeding through London, weaving between traffic and capturing the city on a shaky GoPro camera strapped to his helmet.
When he stumbles upon an ultra-corrupt politician (John Hannah) leaning over the dead body of a young woman, he becomes embroiled in a blackmail plot that unfolds on two wheels in the streets and back alleys of the capital.
As things take a turn for the worst, Chris’s sister Danni gets behind the handlebars and steers the film on towards catastrophe.
With a hint of the Dogme 95 spirit about it, plus a decent soundtrack, there’s some promise early on, but a flimsy narrative, reams of clunky dialogue and a precocious but uninteresting approach to style render it ultimately flat.
Hannah brings something of a demonic-Malcolm-Tucker feel to his role and copes well with what little the script offers, but just about every other member of the cast gets it wrong, in this failed fusion of Guy Ritchie, Skins and the 90s cartoon series Biker Mice From Mars.
Walking the line: Iain Sinclair (left) surveys London
London’s itinerant seer Iain Sinclair, famed for his documented walks around the city, has set out again to trek around the ‘ginger line’ for a filmed adaptation of his latest book, London Overground.
Directed by John Rogers, the film takes place over the course of the year, rather than a single day. It follows Sinclair as he follows the railway tracks on foot from his home in Haggerston, visiting 33 stations in a 35 mile round trip.
Film-maker Andrew Kötting, who walked him when he first made the 15 hour journey, joins him in Rotherhithe, and they make their way together through Canada Water, Surrey Quays to Queens Road Peckham.
At Willesden Junction he is met by film-maker and author Chris Petit, and in Dalston local campaigner Bill Parry-Davies, who composed some of the film’s score, joins him to survey what has changed as the area has been redeveloped.
Sinclair dubbed the Overground the ‘ginger line’ after he heard the moniker from some costumed art students in New Cross, who make an appearance in the film too.
He describes it as the “spin-drier of capitalism whirling bank notes around the city – a real moment to look at this city of unreal money” where a new city is emerging.
The film offers a “snapshot of the city in transition and a unique insight into the most important chronicler of contemporary London.”
The film will premiere as part of the East End Film Festival. The screening will take place at the Rio Cinema in Dalston on Saturday 2 July and a Q&A with Iain Sinclair and John Rogers will be held afterwards.
A thriller on bicycles, other worldly visitations and the iconic Two Puddings pub are in the offing at the East End Film Festival, which gets underway this week.
The 11-day festival starts on 23 June – the day of the EU referendum. But whatever the outcome of that, the festival atmosphere is set to be one of celebration.
Alongside some of the best independent British films there is a focus on Turkish cinema, as well as a day dedicated to films and debate on the refugee crisis. There are also several new films either inspired by or set in East London.
Cycling thiller: Alleycats. Photograph: Christina Solomons
Alleycats
London filmmaker Ian Bonhote’s debut feature Alleycats premieres at the festival’s opening gala on Thursday. Featuring a flock of British talent, it is a high-energy thriller that romps through the streets of East London on the seat of a bicycle. When bike courier Chris witnesses what looks like a murder, his first instinct is to flee. But as his curiosity draws him back in, he is soon embroiled in a world of corruption, political power and and illegal bike racing.
7pm, 23 June, Genesis
Crisis point: scene from Mile End. Photograph: Jon-Paul Washington
Mile End
Mile End is the debut feature from local director Graham Higgins, which recently won Best Feature at the New York City Independent Film Festival. Set against the backdrop of Canary Wharf during the financial crisis, it centres on two unemployed runners who meet by chance. Paul has just left his job and is experiencing trouble at home, so welcomes the experience and guidance of John. But his new friend’s ubiquitous presence soon becomes unnerving.
9pm, 28 June, Genesis
Existential: Native
Native
Science fiction is not usually a genre associated with East London, but Native, a slick looking feature starring Rupert Graves, may change that. When a signal is received from the other side of the universe, Cane and Eva are sent out to colonise a distant world. Shot predominantly in East London, this feature by Daniel Fitzsimmons raises questions about what it is to be human and whether masters should be obeyed.
7pm, 1 July, Genesis
Seeking justice: Marcus and Kurtis seek justice for Mark Duggan in The Hard Stop
The Hard Stop
The riots sparked by the shooting of Mark Duggan in 2011 were unlike anything seen in the UK since the early 1980s. But the true circumstances of Duggan’s death remained mysterious. This documentary, directed by George Amponsah, follows friends of Mark Duggan as they seek justice for him, exploding historical tensions between law enforcement and London’s black community in the process.
7pm, 30 June, Genesis
Iconic pub: Tales from the Two Puddings
Tales from the Two Puddings
This documentary by Rob West focuses on the Two Puddings pub on Stratford Broadway. The iconic venue was a cultural touchstone for 1960s East London, so notorious that it was nicknamed The Butcher’s Shop. But it was also known for its great live music and dancing. The pub served as inspiration for the Long Good Friday, and has links to an eclectic cast of characters including David Essex, Harry Redknapp and Matt Johnson of band TheThe.
6pm, 25 June, Stratford Picturehouse
Disturbing tale: Gates of Vanity
The Gates of Vanity
This Hackney-based horror thriller by Suj Ahmed is about a man fighting to reclaim his life after a disturbing turn of events. Ben is newly unemployed and feeling lonely when his family go away. So he takes in a homeless man whilst he renovates his house. But a simple disagreement triggers a psychotic reaction in his house guest. Ben is held captive and physically abused. He must discover if he can fight back and reclaim his life.
Being a drag queen is about saying “fuck you” to everyone else, declares DJ John Sizzle to the camera at the start of Dressed as a Girl, a new documentary about East London’s alternative drag scene.
The film, set to be one of the highlights of this month’s East End Film Festival, charts six years in the lives of a group of people who share a love of partying, dressing up and a determination to express themselves however they want.
“Coming of age stories are usually people in their teens and early 20s but this is about people in their-mid 30s and turning 40 and growing up finally,” says the scene’s ‘ringmaster’, Jonny Woo.
Woo gained a cult following in East London after he founded Gay Bingo in 2003, a notorious night out which used bingo as a pretext for all manner of outrageous goings-on.
Complete with blonde wig and fake eyelashes, Woo presents each character in turn, building up the mythology of the group with a languid delivery that contrasts to the chaos on screen.
We meet Amber, a transvestite model who wants to transition into a woman. Holestar is a self-proclaimed ‘tranny with a fanny’, the only biological female of the group. Scottee is an ambitious show off with a troubled past, while Pia claims to have predicted the end of the world. And then there’s John Sizzle who, as he approaches the age of 45, wonders if drag is still for him.
The film begins with early footage of Gay Bingo, when the scene was in its infancy. Using the innocent concept of bingo as an excuse for madcap debauchery (you have to see it to believe it), it shows how ready excess and exhibitionism was the group’s stock-in-trade.
Jonny Woo as Dressed as a Girl’s narrator
The film then leaps ahead to Glastonbury in 2009, a gig at the Royal Opera House and Lovebox.
“The idea initially was for it to be a year in the life of all these East London alternative performers as a time capsule-type thing,” says Holestar, who came up with the idea to make a film alongside its director, Colin Rothbart.
“But because of funding we decided to make it a longer project, which was quite beneficial in the long term because you see how everyone changes as people.
“It’s a celebration of that alternative, new artistic wave of creativity that was taking over at the time, especially in Hackney. I like to think it’s an East London celebration.”
Colin Rothbart moved to East London in 2008 and makes television programmes for the likes of MTV by day. He wasn’t part of the gay scene when he agreed to direct Dressed as a Girl, he says, and as an unknown quantity he wasn’t trusted from the outset.
“Because I had a TV background I think some of them thought oh he’s going stitch us up, so there was always that suspicion and it took a long time to get the core characters on board.”
But once signed up, the core characters had their own ideas about the filming. Some wanted their performances to be the film’s focus but that, says Rothbart, would have made it a “home video for the scene”.
“They didn’t really want me to meet their family or ask some probing questions about their past or anything like that, so that took a long time. I think that’s why it benefitted from having six years to film.”
Looking past the wigs and false eyelashes to darker and more serious issues such as suicide, addiction and mental illness gives the film a far broader appeal that will hopefully ensure it gets an audience outside East London.
“We’re all eventually talking about quite low moments in our lives, or very personal things,” says Woo.
“I think this idea, that everything’s great, everything’s fun, but actually we’re all dealing with some quite serious shit… it kind of destroys the illusion a little bit.”
Each of the characters is a star in their own right, and a few of them could carry a film on their own. Amber’s story, from holding a fundraiser in Dalston to raise money for a boob job, to opening up her own shop and a difficult reunion with her family, is at turns funny, moving and inspiring.
“She really wanted her story to be a beacon for people who are growing up, and being transgender in countries where it wasn’t accepted, so she let us into every aspect of her life,” says Rothbart.
For Woo, the excesses of the drag scene almost proved fatal. The film shows him coming back from the brink and redefining his life.
“It is about the glamour and hedonism, but it’s also about the effects of it,” says Rothbart. “The scene is great fun but it can kill you if you’re not careful. And if you’re being offered unlimited drink and drugs some people take it a little too far sometimes.”
Jonny Woo, John Sizzle and co at Hackney Empire
The six-year filming period allows you to see each character, in all their fabulousness and all their flaws. Holestar, who was this year named Best Drag Act at the London Cabaret Awards, talks freely about her struggles with depression.
“My aim for the film was for anyone who thinks they’re different to be able to watch this and think it’s ok, you can be whatever the hell you want to be.”
Two of the characters, Jonny Woo and John Sizzle, as well as the director Rothbart, now own a pub called The Glory on Kingsland Road, while Scottee has become a Radio 4 broadcaster as well as associate artist at the Roundhouse. So has the scene grown up and disbanded?
“Not so much actually,” Jonny Woo insists. “The drag scene in East London is as vibrant as it was back then and is bigger, and has far more people doing drag.
“People moan and say there’s nothing’s going on and things are closing down, but the East London drag scene is absolutely buzzing. That scene was of its time, but the party isn’t over.”
DRESSED AS A GIRL will be released by Peccadillo Pictures, where it is playing throughout the UK as part of the POUT Fest Tour followed by the DVD late 2015.
Winner of Best Documentary, Mistaken For Strangers
The East End Film Festival has been running for thirteen years, forging itself a reputation as one of the country’s foremost champions of fresh indie talent. With an alternative and cosmopolitan spirit coursing through its veins, this year’s fortnight-long event was as teeming as ever with memorable works from both home and abroad. Three films in particular left a lasting impression.
You and the Night (Les Rencontres d’après minuit)
Yann Gonzalez’s erotic debut feature is like The Breakfast Club meets Let the Right One In meets Drive, only it’s not quite as good as this combination might sound. It’s short on direction and substance, but a stuffing of sensual nourishment and a mesh of bold aesthetic ideas suggest a bright future for the French director.
Fabienne Babe and Eric Cantona deliver standout performances as participants in an orgy of lost souls in search of sexual therapy. Cast in a neon-lit semi-future, this original avant-garde piece explores dreams, love, loss and Cantona’s outlandishly large member.
Pleasing on the eye – and the ears even more so – You and the Night is very nearly a very clever re-imagining of traditional narrative techniques. Gonzalez is certainly one to watch.
The Distance (La distancia)
The Distance is strange and beautiful. It’s a Borgesian heist movie in which a trio of depraved dwarves, with telepathic and telekinetic powers, attempt to steal an abstract concept from an abandoned industrial power plant. Set in a surrealist Siberian landscape, the film was shot in Catalonia and captures a majestic kind of dereliction. The story itself isn’t completely satisfying, but through a fun combination of original sound and image – coupled with a hefty dose of dark humour – Sergio Caballero’s film leaves a distinct, Lynch-like mark.
Mistaken for Strangers
Named the festival’s Best Documentary, Mistaken for Strangers takes the rock-doc format to new and impressive territory. Tom Berninger, brother of The National frontman Matt Berninger, has lived in the shadow of stardom for too long; it’s his turn to shine, and shine he does. Invited to join The National on tour as a roadie, the amateur director takes a meta-introspective look at the distance between him and his iconic elder brother. Seemingly incompetent and completely disorganised, Tom roughly shuns any notion that he might be concerned with band dynamics or the music, subverting the genre to great effect.
What follows is hilarious and moving. It’s a self-reflexive jaunt into the depths of the sibling psyche, reaching a bizarre and dramatic climax in which the focus is almost entirely on the making of the film. Mistaken for Strangers is uplifting and unforgettable, with a magical final scene and a hearty nod to Werner Herzog, who makes a brief appearance.
East London filmmaking duo Phil Maxwell and Hazuan Hashim’s latest documentary, to be screened at the East End Film Festival this month, started in the Pride of Spitalfields pub. A friend put them in touch with somebody in Soho, a ‘real character’. One minute they were in the pub, the next, as Hashim puts it, they “were out in Soho interviewing a man called Harvey Gould”. Their documentary takes Maxwell and Hashim away from East London and into the heart of Soho. “It was a challenge because we were out of our comfort zone,” said Hashim. Thankfully they were with a “proper Soho native”. Gould, born in 1927, who grew up in Wardour House, “wants his story out there”. Maxwell adds: “He has an extraordinary memory and really remembers how the place has changed over the years.” Gould took Maxwell and Hashim on a personal tour of his London, weaving his narrative and memory with beautiful shots of Soho. Gould tells how, after the war, he used to run lemonade to Trafalgar Square to sell to the GIs. Hashim and Maxwell also got access to an old prostitute parlour overlooking Berwick Street market, “which still had the red light outside”. Maxwell and Hashim point out that plenty of films have highlighted Soho’s sex trade, but they wanted to show a different side to Soho. Maxwell says: “Harvey says the prostitutes were always very friendly. They were just an integral part of the community. Harvey accepted it. Soho is always changing. It’s a place that has always evolved to the pressures of being in central London.” Hashim adds that Gould used to paint wickets on the walls in the alley ways of Soho. “The traces are still there,” Hashim says. The documentary is not just interested in present narrative, then; it is about the traces of an older London, kept alive by one man’s memories. Hashim and Maxwell had “difficulty keeping up with Harvey”, a man who moved with the energy of a younger man. “He just really wanted to tell his story,” Hashim says, adding that Gould is now “living with cancer”. When asked if this gave the film a sense of urgency, Maxwell said yes, but was keen to point out that Gould “was really relaxed and wasn’t one of these people who felt sorry for himself. He wouldn’t let a disease curtail his enthusiasm for life”. Hashim and Maxwell’s documentary might have been “outside of their comfort zone” but they have found a lot of similarities between the areas. “East London and Soho, they’re villages,” says Maxwell. Their new documentary is a celebration of community, memory and a city that is constantly renewing itself. Harvey’s Soho will be showing at the Rio Cinema on 22 June as part of the East End Film Festival.
Underwater shot from Club Sandwich, showing at Rich Mix as part of the East End Film Festival this month
The uninitiated might find something incongruous about the East End Film Festival having a focus on contemporary Mexican cinema, but it always has been an outward and cosmopolitan affair and not just a chance to check out the latest East London gangster movie.
Luis Buñuel, Guillermo de Toro, Gael García Bernal and Amores Perros are on my most rudimentary of Mexican cinema checklists, but of course this doesn’t begin to scratch the surface. Today, in some quarters, the now hackneyed phrase ‘new wave’ is being rolled out, so this month’s festival will provide film audiences with the chance to see whether it really is a wave,
or just a ripple.
In his hometown of Mexico City, director Sebastian Hofmann is gearing up for an appearance at the festival as its director-in-residence. Last year, Hofmann’s debut feature Halley won the Best Feature Award. It is a tense and surreal film about a man who is lonely because he has a secret – he cannot die. And while he plays out his life working in a gym among well-honed bodies, his own body is rotting away.
“It comes from the fear of having to live inside a body, of being imprisoned in a skin suit and knowing that eventually you will decay and die,” he tells me matter of factly.
The main character, Alberto, Hofmann describes as a “contemporary Frankenstein” – an epilogue filmed in Greenland rams home the allusion – and his life in Mexico City, one of the most populous places on the planet, is a solitary one, dominated by the secret of his immortality and the constant attempts to ‘maintain’ his rotting body.
Hofmann calls his film “a philosophical essay on the body and skin”, though the roots of his filmmaking lie in a childhood spent watching eighties horror movies. Having studied cinema, his tastes are now more refined, and his concerns more about finding new and original forms of expression in film.
“I like it when films surprise me. I watch a lot of great films but they look just like all the great films that I’ve watched in the past, or they look like the great films that have been made for the past 100 years,” he says.
Director Sebastian Hofmann
Having won Best Feature for Halley, Hofmann was invited to help curate a selection of films from his home country for this year’s festival. His choice prioritises those directors with a strange and unusual vision.
“One of them is called Malaventura by a friend of mine from Mexico City called Michel Lipkes. It’s a very original look at the old part of Mexico City, which is filled with fantastic characters and locations but also quite dangerous. He did this beautiful portrait of an old man in his last days who lives alone there, in down town Mexico City with all the decadence of the city.”
Hofmann highlights two directors at the festival whose films represent opposing strands in contemporary Mexican film. Diego Quemada’s The Golden Dream (La Jaula de Oro) concerns immigration and is about three teenagers from Guatemala who decide to flee their lives and head to the United States, passing through Mexico. Fernando Eimbcke’s Club Sándwich, meanwhile, is about puberty and separation anxiety as 15-year-old Héctor discovers love and sex while on holiday with his mum.
“Both are completely different filmmakers: one is concerned with the family and family crisis and the other is concerned with social issues and immigration. Mexico is going through really dark times politically and socially. Some explore that, criticising what’s going on using social realism, and other filmmakers have been doing quite the opposite and searching for fantasy or exploring other things. All these original voices are coming out and I think it’s only going to get better.”
Hofmann talks of Mexico as a place of contrasts, where thousands of years of human sacrifices gave way after the Spanish conquest to the rituals of Roman Catholicism. “It became this insane spiritual and religious mess and Mexico still hasn’t quite got over it.” Violence, including lynchings and beheadings, are still known to occur in rural areas. “I think there’s never not been beheadings in Mexico,” he says. “Blood is normal here.”
Halley, though, is a more personal film (“Politics bores me to hell,” Hofmann admits), though it bears the hallmarks of Mexico through the suffering of its main character, the ‘living corpse’ Alberto. “Alberto is stuck here with his suffering and he’s not going to reach heaven. He’s stuck with this middle ground that’s the physical ground and is the witness of his own decay.”
The East End Film Festival focuses on the work of first and second time directors. At such an early stage in their careers, each director will in some respect have faced a fight to get their films made.
Hofmann was lucky enough to convince a private investor to back the film, as well as the Mexican production company Mantarraya, but once it was shot he had to turn to Europe to attract the necessary funds for post-production. He rebounds, however, my suggestion that Mexican filmmakers might have it harder than their European counterparts.
“It’s subjective because my film had special effects and elements that made it a little bit more expensive, even though there’s hardly any dialogue and most of the film is shot inside. But really I think it’s just as hard here as anywhere else.
“You can always make a different kind of film just by grabbing a good digital camera with a microphone, asking some friends to help who are good actors, and then make a human story. You know you don’t have to do something far out.”
Sebastian Hofmann will be part of a Mexican cinema panel held after a screening of Malaventura at Barbican Cinema on 22 June.
Blackfish, one of the films shown at last year’s East End Film Festival
The East End Film Festival has launched its first ever crowdfunding project, which aims to raise at least £25,000 by Sunday 11 May.
In the few years since its inception in 2001, The East End Film Festival has become one of the UK’s largest international film festivals, with its annual programmes notable for their ecclecticism and breadth.
This year’s festival in June will be a special one, as the once council-backed event is now an independent Community Interest Company. This is a type of social enterprise whose profits and assets are used only to achieve its social objectives.
Appealing to members of the public for pledges, festival organiser Alison Poltock said: “With your support, we aim to produce free community activities, free public events, and bring more filmmakers than ever before to show their work at the festival.
“In the spirit of the festival’s history of openness, we want you to play an active role in shaping this future by supporting this campaign, and getting a say in the life of EEFF. We cannot continue our work in these areas without your help.”
Incentives for those making pledges include ‘Wall Of Fame’ listings, badges, model-making kits of the festival mascot ‘Eddie The Eel’ and VIP opening night tickets with red-carpet access and five-star hotel accommodation.
There are also opportunities to sit in on the festival’s jury dinner, a behind-closed-doors debate to determine which films win which awards, or to go on a tailor-made industry insight day.
