Doc/Fest is renowned for the quality and breadth of our conference sessions. We invite the industry to submit their session ideas to us all year, so the conference is industry-generated and totally relevant. This isn’t a festival where you’ll get the same issues being discussed by the same people year after year. We want the current big issues to be featured, discussed by the people doing interesting things right now. And we want blunt honesty from speakers and audience. We…

This year, for the first time, Doc/Fest will host a day’s summit all about community media. The sessions will look at innovative and meaningful ways of involving communities in film and digital media production. This isn’t the way that ‘community media’ is often conceived – often film/interactive projects arising through community schemes are all about ‘issues’ that simply by their existence are given moral credibility. But we’re talking about media comprising a production process that involves communities speaking in their…

Today, it’s the film programme we’re talking about: Never mind the excuses you have heard recently abut the economy shaping the way docs are these days. You don’t need a lot of money to have a good idea. The films we have lined up for doc/fest this year prove that point a few times over. From across the seas, I’m firstly really proud of showing a film from the USA called ‘Player Hating: A Love story’. Trailing a young rapper…

All this week, we’ll be giving you a taster of what Doc/Fest has to offer. On Tuesday, it’s the film programme. Wednesday, our ‘Involving Communities’ summit day, Thursday, the sessions/conference programme, and Friday, the Crossover summit. But today, I’m going to tell you about our Marketplace this year. Doc/Fest’s marketplace isn’t like most other European markets, because we try and do things a little more personally. We have the MeetMarket, where you can meet with 175 people with money, advice,…

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One of our oldest festival friends, Encounters (16 – 21 Nov), has announced this year’s programme and we’re delighted to see 42 Shooters with films screening. This year the festival returns to its dual programme, with Brief Encounters and Animated Encounters both having their own identity, raising animation’s profile in the South West further. There are plenty of events to put in your diary, but her a few we thought might be of interest to Shooters: Brief Encounters MEET THE…

Trips to film festivals are always fun. It’s the one time you can indulge in five films a day without feeling like you’re an obsessive recluse who chooses screen time over human interaction. However, my recent trip this weekend to Berwick Upon Tweed’s Film & Media Arts Festival felt much more civilised than the usual mayhem. This undoubtedly had something to do with the beautiful setting. Located right in the middle between Newcastle and the Scottish Border, Berwick is a…

BAFTA screening – Sat 6.45pm If you are a Bafta member, please book your tickets! If not, we have a pair of tickets for the first person to email info@americanthemovie.com with the answer to this question: “When Bill wished that LA would fall into the ocean, what did he name the geographical feature that would be left behind?” Good luck! A special feature of the BAFTA screening is that Steve and Mary Hicks will be joining us via Skype from…

Shooters Matt Harlock and Paul Thomas will soon be seeing their feature documentary American: The Bill Hicks Story opening in UK cinemas on 14 May. Four years in the making, American pushes documentary storytelling in a new direction, using a stunning new animation technique to tell the amazing life story of the iconoclastic comedian and his struggle to get his voice heard. For the uninitiated, here’s a brief background of who Bill was and the story the film seeks to…

A filmmaker friend once said to me, when your feature documentary is finished, that’s when the really hard work begins. At the time, we were nearing the end of a long edit for our feature doc Erasing David, in the midst of one of the busiest times of the project and not sleeping a whole lot. I did not believe it. Now I do. The idea for Erasing David began almost three years ago. We were looking for an idea…