Earlier this year, we joined SP member, Sundance director and New Shoots alumni Eleanor Mortimer on location at Victoria Park, London, as she filmed her new documentary.   Eleanor took a break from shooting to tell us how, using Nikon’s Z 6II mirrorless camera, she created a unique study of the relationship between humans, nature and public space.  Filmmaker Eleanor Mortimer What film are you working on?  I’m making a short documentary, which at the moment is called ‘A to B’.…

SP’s career development short film competition, New Shoots: Filmmakers, is open for submissions four times a year (January, April, July and October.) Guest judges have included the wonderful Sarah Gavron (Director: Rocks, Suffragette), Philip Ilson (Director of London Short Film Festival) and Johnnie Burn (Sound Designer: Ammonite, The Favourite, Under the Skin). The winner of each round takes home a heap of amazing prizes; including Industry Mentorship from BFI Network, Animate Projects or LONO Studio, state of the art Audio…

To celebrate the release of Tomas’ Leach’s latest documentary The Lure, Bertha DocHouse have arranged a special treasure hunt so that the SP community can join the search.

Much of Sheffield Doc/Fest’s objectives this year focused around increasing inclusiveness – attracting new audiences and ensuring that existing ones felt better represented. An announced intent towards “unlocking talent from widest geographical, social and BAME backgrounds” was delivered well in gender representation in the film programme, as “51% of the documentary programme credited a female primary producer and 46% had a female director”. From that number, three feature films and a host of shorter works directed by women that we…

Frames of Representation looks to find a home for “new visions for documentary cinema,” in whichever form that might be interpreted and shape it may arrive. When rounding up his favourite films of last year, festival curator Nico Marzano stated that his ambition each year is “to be inundated by films that are both able to inspire and to take a risk or and to challenge mainstream cinematic languages.” Frames of Representation is the result of this, posing a cross-section of the abundance of creative, challenging…

Currently screening in over 20 cities around the world, Human Rights Watch selects approximately 40 films to be shown worldwide for its Film Festival. 16 of those 40 will screen at the London HRW Film Festival this year. Dedicated to defending and protecting human rights,  these films all highlight the importance of tolerance and change, bringing to light matters of great importance, as well as demonstrating artistic quality.

From Open City Docs, two films that engage with enormous subjects in ambitious fashion. A six hour home video account of Iraq in wartime, and a dramatic, cryptic essay on the nature of border control in modern Europe.

On the day of its commencement, some notes on some of the films playing this year’s Open City Doc Fest, a festival that whilst young and small in scale compared to some of the other documentary festivals, is proving increasing impressive and ambitious. Offering challenging and intelligent programming in both the film and industry sections, and an approach that favours creative, smart documentary filmmaking over the more audience-friendly material you find leading elsewhere, Open City have been consistent from the…

In this second dispatch from Doc/Fest, two films adapted from texts of some kind, and an exploration of the various challenges and opportunities that arise from this process. In a way, all filmmaking is about finding the right cinematic language to externalise something that exists only in the head of the filmmaker, but in these films that process of translation is unusually present.

Running just a few weeks after its larger cousin Sheffield Doc/Fest, Open City Documentary Festival has, in just a few years, established itself as a formidable provider of quality documentary filmmaking in London. Founded by Michael Stewart, a documentary producer and lecturer in Social Anthropology at UCL, alongside the school and their year round screening programme, Open City aims to champion creative non-fiction filmmaking and showcase a mixture of new talent and interesting, disruptive works from more well known documentarians. This…