An 89-year-old with Parkinson’s won a prize last month for his debut short film, Friend or Foe?, exploring what ‘control’ means to someone living with the condition.
David Rose, from Hackney, won a Mervyn Peake Award for the two-minute film, starring a ‘talking eye’ in which he can been seen showing off his dance moves to a Brazilian soundtrack.
“My body won’t always respond to my intentions. My feet are the worse, they simply turn a blind eye,” explains Rose in a voiceover at the start of the film while a close-up of his eye, involuntarily opening and shutting, ‘speaks’ the words.
The Mervyn Peake Awards are run by the charity Parkinson’s UK and celebrate the talents of people with Parkinson’s.
“They said make a film that lasts no more than two minutes, and the only other thing they said was that the theme is control,” says Rose.
“To me that meant that although there’s no cure for parkinson’s we can at least try to control things. There are two ways particularly: pills, taken on time every day and lots of them. The other thing is keeping well-exercised. I tried to make a film that illustrated those two things.”
The main section of the film sees Rose look deadpan into the camera while dancing to a song by the Brazilian songwriter Caetano Veloso.
“I was going to do all sorts of things like get my son playing his saxophone, but then I did the dance and people seemed to like that,” he says.
Rose, who was diagnosed with Parkinson’s 14 years ago, used to work as a producer and director at the BBC and Channel 4, although a filmmaking credit has until now always eluded him.
He explains that he arrived at the title Friend or Foe? by approaching people and asking them what the word ‘control’ meant to them.
“They said things like prison, regulations, no smoking – things that were rather limiting. But I thought there are also sides to control that are beneficial. So I’m saying ‘is control a friend to us or a foe?’ At the end I knock out the word foe and say it’s a friend. To have some sense of control is friendly. It’s a friendly interpretation of the word.”
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.
A few years ago James Lucas, of London Fields, took a rough script to his friend and colleague Mat Kirkby, a commercials director at Ridley Scott Associate Films. He’d written it on a three-hour flight to Bucharest. Kirkby saw potential in the work and so the pair set about an after-hours collaboration to bring the story to life.
Two years on and The Phone Call, starring Sally Hawkins and Jim Broadbent, is pulling in rave reviews on the festival circuit, scooping Best Narrative Short at the prestigious Tribeca Film Festival and qualifying for Academy Awards consideration along the way.
“It’s really just taken off. It’s exceeded any of my expectations, that’s for sure,” says Lucas modestly. “It was nice to have our day-job roles and progress that into this creative collaboration. It’s not the norm but it seems to have worked rather well.”
The film is a stripped-back, emotional short of rare power. It focuses on a single, twenty-minute phone conversation at a Samaritans-esque call centre between Heather, a quiet counsellor, and Stan, a troubled pensioner in search of comfort.
“It was actually inspired by a close relative being a Samaritan and that got my creative ball rolling I suppose,” Lucas explains. “They’re like unsung heroes, they’re like angels. They’re people that willingly give up their time without any pay and deal with these very complex situations and scenarios and conversations. They do it I suppose out of empathy and I thought that’s just such a brilliant thing.
“I’m not going to be too dramatic, but in a world that seems increasingly selfish and self-obsessed I was just interested in looking at the other side of that, at people who still retain a sense of empathy.”
His desire to shine a light on the delicate, relatively underexplored realm of phone counsel was shared by Kirkby, who also has family working in the field. On receiving the script, the director’s first creative task was to structure the narrative and flesh out Heather’s character.
“I made her this little sort of mousy character that you maybe underestimate,” he says. “You perhaps learn that she’s actually very tenacious and she doesn’t want to let go of this guy.”
Hawkins, who was recently nominated for an Oscar for her part opposite Cate Blanchett in Woody Allen’s Blue Jasmine, is extraordinary in the role. The camera is zoomed on her desperate features for a good portion of the film’s 20-minute running time, capturing a fluid facial performance that brilliantly bears the weight of an extremely heavy situation.
Kirkby explains that during filming the actress would work through the entire script in single takes. “She’d get into the whole flow of this 20-minute performance and feel it. She was shaking and crying and after each take she had to have a good old sit down,” he says. “I don’t know if I’ll ever see anything like that again. It was like watching it happen live, it was quite incredible.”
Having waited close to a year for confirmation that Hawkins would be available for the project – with a two-week window confirmed at short notice – the Academy Award-winning Broadbent signed up two days later. “So one was ten months and one was two days,” Kirkby says. “You get someone like Jim Broadbent straight away because he would love to do it opposite Sally.”
In a bold and decisive directorial move, Broadbent’s character remains anonymous throughout the film, never physically appearing onscreen at the other end of the line.
“There was an audacity in not showing his face,” says Lucas. “I think it’s almost like a novel where it’s left up to you to construct that character and that character’s physical features and his or her persona – just for the fact that it gives it added personal poignancy, I think.”
Kirkby elaborates: “To me it’s a massive dramatic device because if you see the person on the other end you immediately make judgments on them or you can see what their problem is,” he says. “I think the minute the question marks stop, that’s when the drama stops. You have to have the viewer asking questions. To be honest, when we found that we’d got Jim Broadbent I was like ‘Oh bugger, I’ve got an Oscar-winning actor and my plan is not to film him.’”
The Phone Call has taken the talented pair on a journey all over the world – from the London Film Festival to Tribeca in New York and events in Cork, Dresden, Miami and Aspen – where the piece has been met with overwhelming praise and acclaim.
With talk of a full-length feature based on the material, the friends are sure to link up again in the not-so-distant future. “To stand up in Tribeca Film Festival on stage together and then be shaking hands with Robert DeNiro. Yeah, I’d quite like to continue that,” Kirkby laughs.
What started as a loose idea and a common interest between colleagues has grown into a sensitive work of serious artistic merit, stretching the short format to its complete and glorious potential.
“It’s been about making something meaningful rather than sensational, something thoughtful,” Lucas affirms as we say goodbye, summing things up rather nicely.
You talking to me? Chris Bouchard’s Hackney’s Finest
Director Chris Bouchard – the man behind sensational Lord of the Rings spin-off The Hunt for Gollum, which has raked in over 13 million views on Youtube – has turned his creative eye to Hackney for a first full-length feature, set to premiere at the East End Film Festival this month.
Hackney’s Finest is billed as an East London gangster flick that follows a troupe of hapless drug dealers as they clash with Russian thugs, Welsh-Jamaican rude boys and a pair of villainous coppers. Going by the trailer, it looks to be a mash-up of Guy Ritchie and John Mackenzie, with a squeeze of Tarantino to boot.
“It’s quite extreme,” says Bouchard. “It’s got lots of drug use, it doesn’t shy away from strong language and violence, and it’s trying to reflect what things might actually be like on the streets of East London. It’s real but it’s also having fun. It’s entertaining and it doesn’t take itself too seriously, but it’s not totally ridiculous. You could almost believe that these characters could be out there somewhere – Hackney Wick probably,” he laughs.
“There are definitely nods to those guys who’ve made these brilliant films and it’s a sense of humour that I really appreciate, but it’s got its own twist. We’ve got these characters that you haven’t seen before in the Guy Ritchie films.”
Bouchard came across the script soon after the success of Gollum, his debut short. He explains that his mother was attending a creative writing class in Gloucester when she met Thorin Seex, a burgeoning screenwriter. Foreseeing a fruitful collaboration, she put the two in touch.
“He’s an interesting guy. He’s an ex-squatter from Hackney and now he’s in insurance,” Bouchard says. “He’s willing to admit he’s had a very misspent youth, and he’s written all these crazy stories.”
The film has already courted some controversy, meeting with a mixed response from viewers at private test screenings. In addition to the violence and language, the director readily admits that Hackney’s Finest makes light of persistent and substantial drug use. He describes the decision to treat the material in this way as tough but correct.
“The drug use is pretty strong, it doesn’t hold back. It’s got quite a flippant tone to it and so some people were a bit horrified at this and then other people who were a bit more open-minded were like, ‘Wow, this is pushing it a bit beyond what we’ve seen before’. So yeah, there are some strong themes in there.”
With its full cinema release not scheduled for another four or five months, Bouchard is thrilled for the feature to be premiering at the Hackney Picturehouse as part of the East End Film Festival.
“It’s just perfect isn’t it? We’re just really happy about that,” he says. “Hackney Picturehouse is a great cinema and the whole story happens just round the corner so it’s pretty cool. It’s the perfect place really.”
No matter what happens at the premiere on 14 June, Hackney’s Finest is sure to leave a mark.
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.
Jane Fonda in a still from the Cherchez La Femme exhibition at Space Studios
In late November 1967, the newly-named Sony Corporation – a young, but blossoming Japanese electronics company – released the Portapak CV-2400, the world’s first consumer videotape recorder. Battery-powered, portable, and inexpensive: no longer was video the preserve of elite television companies and their hegemonic value systems.
As the Portapak’s poetic manual put it: “The portable video system represents the essence of decentralised media. One person now becomes an entire TV studio, capable of producing a powerful statement.”
Though Sony’s advertising campaigns for the Portapak depicted the video camera being used by all echelons of society, according to Alaina Claire Feldman, head of exhibitions for Independent Curators International, it became a potent weapon for French feminist collectives during the 1970s. Activist groups like Vidéa and Insoumuses documented wild demonstrations along the boulevards of Paris and radical manifestos against male power.
Feldman, the organiser of a new exhibition at Hackney’s SPACE studios, which is screening a number of these engrossing, politicised videos, explains: “The Portapak offered an opportunity for documentation of what was happening in the streets, in the factories, in private libraries and conversations, but also for creative critique of the moving image itself.”
“The portable video came exactly at the right moment: the start of the women’s liberation movement in France, hot on the heels of May ‘68,” she continued. “It was also totally unexpected that women would embrace technology at the time, and because video was so new, it had no history or canon to struggle with; it was entirely open.”
The name of the exhibition, ‘Cherchez La Femme’, is a reappropriated French colloquialism that traditionally suggests the root of all problems is women. It is this sort of institutional misogyny that these recently-translated feminist films were, and still are, railing against.
Maso and Miso Go Boating (1976), for example, is a scathing meditation on the rigid roles that women are permitted in public life. After recording footage of a French television talk show, Delphine Seyrig, along with three other women, eviscerate the shocking statements made by Françoise Giroud, supposedly the country’s Minister for Women’s well being. They edit, freeze-frame, superimpose, and add hand-written titles to Giroud’s various patronising claims: that surgery is too difficult for women, or how women’s ambitions should never go beyond pleasing their man.
The videos show both the dynamic potential in, and the collective creation of the films, mirroring how the feminist movement actually functioned. In Kate Millet Speaks about Prostitution with Feminists (1975), we see this reality: sat crosslegged on the floor, in a room with bookshelves filled to the brim, French and American feminists passionately debate the plight of the prostitutes, while ceaselessly puffing away on their Gauloises. Innovations in technology can often lead to societal change, and the Sony Portapak was no exception. The dissemination of low-budget and lo-fi work like this forged networks of exchange, catalysed strains of guerilla television, and allowed self-representation for many women. Whether these feminist collective’s goals have been achieved is still far from certain, but Feldman has “hope there’s some consequences that eventually come out of it” for the residents of Hackney that get to see them.
Cherchez La Femme is at SPACE Studios, 129—131 Mare Street, E8 3RH until 13 July.
For the last year, Hackney author and filmmaker Iain Sinclair has been involved in a work of Odyssean proportions. In celebration of his seventieth birthday last June, he was asked to curate a personal project entitled 70×70, choosing 70 films for a series of special screenings and discussions across the capital. The task has taken him on a voyage into his own past, through a history of independent film and deep into the cinematic consciousness of London.
Speaking on a Saturday morning – stealing an hour before he must set off for a showing at the Elephant and Castle of three obscure features I’d not heard of – he gives me a brief overview of the experience.
“When I took it on I had no idea quite what it would involve. It seems like one of those ideas you get sitting down in a pub or having a late breakfast somewhere off Broadway Market and someone says ‘would you like to pick 70 films?’” It was a notion proposed to him by Paul Smith of King Mob, a spoken-word label that released CDs by Sinclair in the 90s.
“It sounds like a great sort of birthday present,” he continues. “And one way of looking back at the part films have played in my life, but in actuality it involved writing descriptions of all of these 70 films and then travelling out night after night to funny parts of the town.”
The films chosen have been a peculiar and intriguing bunch. The list includes the likes of Herzog, Fassbinder, Godard, Hitchcock and Hopper, not to mention a vast catalogue of directors you’ll never have come across. It’s a gold mine for film-lovers looking to fill their pockets with rare and forgotten gems.
“It’s kind of an act of archaeology and rescue and salvage and scavenging in lots of ways, in the same process as people comb through car boot sales or markets and pick up strange lost videos and DVDs and so on.”
The process of picking such a large number of films might sound difficult, but while the physical side of 70×70 has taken its toll, Sinclair explains that selection itself was not so much of a challenge.
“It was literally about going back, using my books that I’ve published, looking at what films were referenced in each of these books, making an initial list and then including some films that I’ve been involved with to give a fuller sense of a life in London that was largely hung around the presence of certain films.”
To borrow a phrase from his excellent book about the Beat poets, American Smoke, the project seems to have been like a raid on his own past. He describes the act of editing as similar to piecing together a kind of autobiographical documentary. However, not simply a linear map of films he’s watched along the way, the project explores the medium in a geographical sense, retracing the changing environment of film viewing and almost resurrecting a pre-internet sort of cinema experience.
Born in Maesteg in South Wales, Sinclair was living and studying in Brixton when he first “chased a film” to what’s now the Rio cinema in Dalston. This element of travel – an almost topographical approach – was an essential aspect of the work.
“It was my first visit to the East End,” he explains. “In a sense the geography of London was involved with where I saw certain films and that went on for a number of years. Obviously now the whole way of looking at films is very different with DVDs and the way that films can be found that once upon a time involved terrific geographical chases to track them down.”
The idea of simply finding a film on the web is still a foreign one to him; perhaps he sees it as a lazy, even defeatist mode of viewing that detracts from the fun of the hunt and the pilgrimage he so values.
“There’s something very magical still about seeing them actually in the community of the cinema, this building which goes back so deep into the culture of London – a bunch of people staring at this huge screen on which this rather wonderful and exotic product that’s come from somewhere is being shown just for that day, for that week. It was very special.
“Now the whole sense of it is very different. Obviously you can just type in a name and something comes up on your small screen and you think you’ve sampled it, but you haven’t had that complete sensory experience that also involves the journey and the community that you’re watching it with.”
It’s an invigorating message and one that lends itself to a wider understanding of Sinclair’s approach to his own work. Research seems to come hand in hand with experience and almost always involves a trip, an exploration – in the fullest sense of the word.
For his acclaimed book London Orbital he traversed the 120-mile length of the M25; for Swandown – a delightfully bizarre poetic documentary made with friend and collaborator Andrew Kötting – he pedalled a plastic swan from Hastings to East London via the back rivers of Kent; and more recently he walked the entire London Overground in a single day for a new book about the railway’s effect on the urban landscape and life therein.
Over the years, Sinclair’s literary output has established him a reputation as a pioneer of British psychogeography, a discipline he might not have been able to skirt entirely for 70×70 but one that is largely absent from his chosen films. When I first heard of the project, I half expected a compilation of documentary essays by Patrick Keiller, Julien Temple, Paul Kelly and the like, but, as he suggests when I put this to him, I may have been guilty of a kind of cultural branding.
“That’s very strongly why they’re not on my list. I didn’t want to go down that particular route because essentially I’d written it,” he says. “If I was just picking films I liked, Patrick Keiller would very probably have come into it, but it was a bit tautologist to do that in this particular context because it’s already such an academic industry. I felt I didn’t need to do that.”
With the series nearing its end, Sinclair looks back on the first event in July last year with particular fondness. Two films were screened at the Hackney Picturehouse – a building he made good use of years ago when it was public library – that mean a lot to him: The Sorcerers, a 1967 piece by his friend Mike Reeves, and The Cardinal and the Corpse, an early 90s collaboration between himself and Chris Petit for Channel 4. “Everything about it felt good,” he says. “I thought that was a rather magic occasion and there’s been many others since.”
The ambitious undertaking of 70×70 is set to finish at the Barbican on 7 and 8 June, with an event that will include an intimate programme of films Sinclair has been directly involved with. He will be joined in conversation by Kötting, Petit and Robert Macfarlane, among others.
“I could easily sit down and do it again with a totally different 70 but I don’t want to,” he laughs, describing the end as a kind of watershed. “I’ve actually recovered a different sense of what film is in London at this moment by doing this project. And hopefully we finish up at the Barbican at the end of it all with a couple of days worth of films that are really personal to me.”
A few days after our interview, I send him an email in search of some extra information and ask how the screening at the Elephant and Castle went. Three films were shown that apparently hadn’t found a niche elsewhere: Too Hot to Handle, The Criminal Life of Archibaldo de la Cruz and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie; it was attended by just four people, three of whom were a part of the project and the other a lone outsider.
“It was like a wake for a certain kind of cinema,” he writes back, in typically brilliant fashion.
Hackney will receive a boost to its green credentials early next month when it holds the opening and closing galas of the UK Green Film Festival.
Venues across the country are to screen independent documentary films from around the world that explore a range of environmental issues.
The opening night at Hackney Picturehouse on 1 June sees the UK premiere of The Last Catch, by German director Marcus CM Schmidt. The film looks at the how bluefin tuna are being fished to extinction and the increasingly ruthless fight among fishermen for the last of a valuable resource.
There will also be a screening of Musicwood, a documentary about a group of guitar-makers who attempt to stop Native American loggers from destroying a primeval forest, while the festival closes with a screening of Expedition to the End of the World, which follows the adventures of a group of scientists, artists and philosophers as they sail to the rapidly melting massifs of North-East Greenland.
In all, seven feature length documentaries will be presented at the festival, all of which will be preceded by an accompanying short film. Each film will be competing for the Palme Verte Award, as well as the UKGFF Audience Award.
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.
