One of the cinematic highlights of my year has been watching Steve Oram’s sensational new film “AAAAAAAAH!” Readers of this blog will probably know him best from Ben Wheatley and Alice Lowe’s “Sightseers” but he has a long history not only as a performer but as creator of bizarre and beautiful comic short films. “AAAAAAAAH!”, which contains not a single word of known language, stars Oram alongside Toyah Wilcox, Lucy Honigman, Julian Rhind-Tutt, Julian Barratt and Tom Meeten. By all accounts it did have one of the funniest scripts you could find but because of the film’s insane central conceit all of that dialogue will only ever be known to the cast.

“AAAAAAAAH!” which is perhaps the best sequel I could ever imagine to the original “Planet of the Apes” is funny, obscene, ludicrous, poignant and braver, bolder and better than anything else you will see this year. It felt to me like a heady mix of Samuel Beckett, Lyndsay Anderson, Spike Milligan and Oliver Postgate but really that’s just me scrabbling around for a way of explaining a film that is truly unique.

There is a special screening of “AAAAAAAH!” at the Picture House Central Friday night at 21:50 and if you are in London you would be a fool to miss it. If you are an independent filmmaker then you should see it for the ambition and daring of what can be done on a true micro budget. This is easily my film of the year and though some of you will probably hate it, you need to see it as however you respond I think this is a real gauntlet thrown down to anyone with an interest in making films.

I’m on the train to Paris with my brother and our friend Fiona who plays Nina in our film. She’s flicking through the complimentary magazine when she shows me a picture and says “Forgetting gender, which of these two would you rather be?”

Knowing nothing about the painting they seemed just like lovers. She is lost in pleasure whilst he has dressed hurriedly, his expression shadowed, his thoughts seemingly rattling noisily in the street beyond the window. Clattering towards the French premiere of our film, I felt like them both. One of the demands of the manifesto that governed the creation of our film is that we tour it, joining our audience to share their reshaping of it night after night. By now my mind is out the window, already dressed and wanting to walk the streets of our next idea, but there I am also – still wrapped in the happiness of the moment. The puritan in me finds one position more praiseworthy than the other but I don’t entirely trust this; all the best lessons I’ve learnt from death are about how to live, how to deny denial. To imagine a film finished when it screens is to think a love affair over when you’re dressed. You hurry nothing by putting on your boots.

However what I saw was not the picture as the artist intended or as his audience understood. Painted in 1878 by Henri Gervex it illustrates the denouement of a poem about a man debauched. The figure is Jacques Rolla surveying his own corruption with a final understanding – having blown all his money on the girl Marion, he is about to take poison and die. Considering the picture as Fiona did, genderless, balances the status of the two in a way impossible to those who saw it at the time. The painting drew scandalised crowds, not because of her nudity but because of her clothes piled in the bottom right. 136 years on, I see a man getting dressed too quickly and killing the mood, the original audience saw a woman who has undressed too fast. The careless abandon of the garments spoke not just of the couple’s reckless lust but of her profession as a prostitute. She isn’t an artistic ideal of beauty, shockingly she is a real woman who takes off her clothes.

As narrative the picture is pretty hammy. The poem considers the culpability of the rich man who pays the poor girl for sex but Gervex’s Marion isn’t the pallid abused child of the text but a healthy woman lost in her own senses. This throws the centre of the story onto poor Jacques at the window, the shadow of his pending suicide becomes a last pathetic spurt of nobility, a final resistance to the corrupting influence of her lovely tits. Despite the scandal she is just a fin de siècle manic pixie dream girl. It’s clear that when painting the couple Gervex did not consider Fiona’s question “Forgetting gender, which of these two would you rather be?”

Film of the Month returns this September with a fresh new look. Cutting the red tape (metaphorically speaking) is award-winning documentarian Sean McAllister.

Sean  is known for his candid, frank films, depicting with extraordinary intimacy the lives of ordinary people who are struggling to survive but are survivors, caught up in political and personal conflict, struggling to make sense of the world we live in. His most recent film, A Syrian Love Story (2015) picked up the Jury Prize at Sheffield Doc/Fest and will be hitting UK cinemas in September. His previous work includes film Liberace of Baghdad (2004), which won the Sundance Jury Prize, and earlier works Working For The Enemy (1997) and The Minders (1998) were both nominated for a Royal Television Society Award.

If you have a short which you would like him to see, head over to Film of the Month to submit before the 14th September.

Transgression is compelling. All filmmakers use transgressive acts to set fire to their stories but even shared taboos have cultural differences. Last weekend I had the very great pleasure of screening “NINA FOREVER” in both Kölne and Hamburg for the Fantasy Film Festival and was proudly told on numerous occasions that Germany has very strictly enforced laws on censorship, but quite contrary ones to America. “Here we have full nudity on tv constantly but you cannot show any violence, there you can kill but you mustn’t fuck”.

Now in its 29th year, FFF is Germany’s essential exploration of taboo busting filmmaking and takes the whole of the August to travel across 7 cities. Founder Rainer Stefan is a lifelong cineaste who first fell in love with movies through a Hammer Horror poster which terrified him long before he was old enough to see the film (which eventually lived up to promise of the poster and terrified him all over again). Rainer is the soul of the festival and it reflects him – passionate and precise but charming even oddly sweet. He retains both that wide-eye child’s view of horror films and an early teenager’s encyclopaedic knowledge of his passion. The festival is programmed by his colleague Frederike Dellert who for years was the outsider’s outsider, the girl who loved horror movies. She’s delighted that this status is changing, the festival’s audience is still predominantly male but the blood splattered fräuleins are on the rise. However Frederike also revels in how the spelling of her name means most people assume she’s a man, “I like to keep them in the dark for as long as I can” she admits with a grin.

Both Rainer and Frederike share a love of the verboten. The films that are too scary to watch, the stories that none of your peers want to engage with. But like jokes not all shocks translate. Sinking into the welcome embrace of a vast leather seat in a beautiful cinema in Köln I have the sudden panic that an audience craving otherwise censored gore is about to be very disappointed. “NINA FOREVER” is blood splattered and full of impossible and awful things happening in darkened rooms but alongside a lot of the FFF programme we seem like the outsider’s outsider.

Talking with Rainer on stage after the screening in Kölne.

What value labels? Thankfully “NINA FOREVER” has been received with open arms by the many festivals like FFF. Some of these get called “horror” some prefer “fantasy”, others go for “midnight” or “underground” or simply (and redundantly) “genre”. These words are noticeably not synonyms. In making our film the only taboos we set out to deliberately break were those of the 3 Act Structure, the Heroes Journey and the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.

After the screening Rainer asked our influences and I found myself talking about Lindsay Anderson and Richard Lester, Powell and Pressburger and that vital seam of surrealism that runs through British screen history but which tends to be overlooked. It is easy to forget that it was the peak of social realism that forged Dennis Potter, a writer determined to prove that for the British the only real taboo was the hateful yolk of conformity.

Doc-lovers! Bertha Dochouse are hosting their first ever short film screening – check out the programme for this week below…

Tuesday 8th September sees DocHouse’s very first short film screening, The Land Between Us, and one of many more to come! In the hopes of becoming, not only the centre for documentary in London, but a new platform for emerging filmmakers and those honing their craft, Bertha DocHouse are thrilled to join the ranks of the capital’s short film enthusiasts.

Join them on Tuesday 8th September at 6:30pm for a series of immersive short films that look beneath the surface of global diaspora and ‘migration’ to Europe. Today, there are over 250 million international migrants and 750 million internally displaced people across the globe. This means there are close to one billion scattered peoples who have broken ties with their homelands in search of a better life. The Land Between Us explores the lives of those who are forced to seek refuge in countries that deliver few promises and little respite from the past.

What we discover is a phenomenon that transcends not only borders, but boundaries of time and memory, and asks us to consider, in whose country do any of us really belong?

Including films from award-winning directors Marc Silver, Morgan Knibbe and Mahdi Fleifel.

Programme

Xenos

Dir. Mahdi Fleifel / UK – Greece / 2013 / 12’

Xenos (Greek: ξένος, xénos) stranger, enemy, alien. In 2010, Abu Eyad and other youngPalestinian men from the Ain el-Helweh refugee camp in Lebanon travelled with smugglers through Syria and Turkey into Greece. Like so many other migrants, they came looking for a way into Europe but found themselves trapped in a country undergoing economic, political, and social collapse.

The Call

Dir. Reber Dosky / Netherlands / 2013 / 25’

Twenty five years ago, Habib and his family were forced to flee their native village in southeast Turkey and move to Istanbul. They were one of thousands whose villages were destroyed in the Turkish army’s attempt to suppress Kurdish resistance. After twenty years Habib returned to his homeland village to resume his former life, without his family. The Call symbolises a paternal longing for his eldest son to join him in the land of his ancestors – a land that has little significance to his children after growing up in the city.

A Life on Hold

Dir. Marc Silver & Nick Francis / UK / 2013 / 6’

When war broke out in Libya in 2011, thousands of refugees from the Middle East and Africa, who were living in or transiting through the country at the time, were forced to flee for their lives yet again. Life on Hold is an intimate portrait of Omar, a 17 year old Somalian stranded in a refugee camp on the border between Libya and Tunisia. Awaiting a chance to start his life again in a safe country, he first has to watch as his friends move on without him.

Jungle Life

Dir. Dave Young / UK / 2015 / 8’

Today, an estimated 5,000 migrants displaced from countries including Syria, Libya and Eritrea are believed to be camped in and around Calais. At least nine have died whilst trying to make the crossing into Britain since June. Filmmaker Dave Young takes us inside Calais’s largest make-shift camp “The Jungle”, home to a diverse community of displaced people, who are given the chance to tell their own stories.

Shipwreck

Dir. Morgan Knibbe / Netherlands / 2014 / 15’

On October 3rd 2013, a boat carrying 500 Eritrean refugees sunk off the coast of the Italian island Lampedusa. More than 360 people drowned. Abraham, one of the survivors, walks through a graveyard of shipwrecks and vividly remembers the nightmarish experience. Meanwhile at the harbour, we are plunged deep into the chaos, as hundreds of coffins are being loaded onto a military ship.

Still Life

Dir. Diana Keown Allan / Lebanon – USA / 2007 / 25’

“The Arab governments pushed us out of our homes… I was twelve years old… I’ve been here for 60 years.” Palestine as it was before 1948 has ceased to exist; Acre is no longer a Palestinian port and the other histories of this city now circulate as highly personal, scattered memories. Still Life is a mesmerising and hypnotic film examining the importance that a few very worn photos play in the life of Said, an elderly Palestinian now living in Lebanon. It is a moving meditation on the role memory plays in the lives of those uprooted by conflict and in exile from their homeland.

This blog started 10 years ago as my field notes from trips round the UK with Shooting People’s Mobile Cinema. Over the years since it has charted the changes to the British independent film scene, profiled some of the more interesting characters who populate it and shared many of mine and my brother’s mistakes, failures and occasional successes culminating in our utterly independent and uniquely British feature “Nina Forever”.

Part funded through our successful Kickstarter campaign and made under the aegis of a strict creative manifesto, “Nina Forever” is not just a story we had to tell, it also expresses some of our deeply held ideas as to how a film should be made. You can follow the history our film through posts on this blog dating back to 2012 and if you’re in London at the end of the month you can follow that story right up to date by attending the film’s UK premiere on 31st August at Film4 Frightfest.

Our world premiere at SXSW was daunting but (appropriately enough for a horror festival) our UK premiere is something more terrifying still, something much more personal. This is when we show our film in our own backyard. This is when after years of theorising from the sidelines I finally put my neck on the line and show you something I poured my heart and soul into. Tickets are still available and I would love to see you there.

Chris and I join a panel discussion led by Film4’s Catherine Bray about Kickstarter and DIY Filmmaking on Sunday 30th August and we’ll also be at all three of our Frightfest screenings for Q&As after the film. We are also going to be joined by our three magnificent leading actors, Fiona O’Shaughnessy, Cian Barry and Abigail Hardingham, our producer Cassandra Sigsgaard and many others from our cast and crew.

I’ve been a member of Shooting People since the year 2000 and no other organisation has offered me more support. No other community has taught me, angered me and inspired me more. No one else better expresses the passion and energy that still drives me to make films. I would love to share my film with you all in the cinema on the 31st August.

Buy your tickets here.

Doc-lovers! A little message from SP’s friends at Bertha Dochouse – check out their exciting programme for this week below…

Marking the release Brian Hill’s latest film, The Confessions of Thomas Quick, Bertha DocHouse is celebrating one of the most radical and respected directors in the UK with a selective retrospective of his work.

Over the last decades, Brian Hill has consistently pushed the bar for documentary by finding inventive ways to make films that challenge audiences and stimulate debate. Brian’s ability to explore powerful social messages through innovative and engaging forms is unique. A retrospective to celebrate his wide-ranging body of work is long overdue.

Films 

The Confessions of Thomas Quick – courtesy of Bertha Dochouse

The Confessions of Thomas Quick

Brian Hill’s latest film is a real-life noir thriller which uncovers the truth behind Sweden’s most notorious serial killer, Thomas Quick.

Saturday Night & Drinking For England

A double bill of Brian Hill’s first collaborations with poet Simon Armitage takes us to Leeds on a Saturday Night and into the lives of England’s drinkers.

Feltham Sings & Songbirds

This pair of emotionally resonant films see Brian Hill collaborating with poet Simon Armitage to give voice to young men and women of Feltham and Downview Prisons– voices we rarely hear.

The Not Dead

A quieter and more intense film than others in this retrospective, The Not Dead carries a political message addressing PTSD across three generations of soldiers. The use of poetry is much subtler and more profound in this, Brian Hill’s last collaboration with Simon Armitage.

The Not Dead – courtesy of 2pigsediting.co.uk

Schedule

Mon 17th Aug:

18.20: The Confessions of Thomas Quick

20.30: The Confessions of Thomas Quick

Tues 18th Aug:

18.30: The Not Dead + Introduction by Brian Hill

Weds 19th Aug:

18.30: Double Bill: Saturday Night & Drinking for England + Q&A with Brian Hill

21.00: The Confessions of Thomas Quick

Thurs 20th Aug:

18.30: Double Bill: Feltham Sings & Songbirds

21.00: The Confessions of Thomas Quick

Bertha DocHouse is the UK’s first documentary cinema based at Curzon Bloomsbury. Book tickets and find more information here.

This is what it feels like to premiere your film at the Fantasia Film Festival in Montreal.

It is, as the local english speaking population would say, awesome. Later that night I discuss the word “awesome” with Mitch who runs the festival who was politely saying how he preferred my use of the more British word “wonderful”, but I like “awesome”. Break it down and really taste the meaning, taste the awe, that breathless, heart stopping glimpse at the blissful scale of reality. Awesome makes you tiny before something vast.

I sometimes think that the process of flying has to be awful, otherwise we’d be too aware of how awesome it is. If you could just be on a plane and look out of the window at that tiny legoland city with its neatly scattered parks and decorous bridges, the boats ploughing white lines up to the Old Port, if you could do all of that in an unfettered instant then your mind would explode at the audacious beauty of it all. So we have to have airports. We have to have airport signage that directs you confidently and clearly to almost exactly where you shouldn’t be. We have to have airport security checks and pissy rules about volumes of harmless liquids. Airline food is surely scientifically balanced to stop your brain bursting with joy by being exactly just utterly foul enough to distract you from marvelling at the fact that you are a monkey in a tin can hanging thousands of feet in the cold blue air above Montreal. It really is awesome.

I’ve never really thought about Quebec but suddenly I’m in the middle of it; a strange through-the-looking-glass world that is both recognisably North American and also utterly French. A vision of the future we could have had if Napoleon had won Waterloo and turned his attentions West. I assumed I’d find a melting pot culture where baguettes and burgers were on every menu, but though most people are easily bilingual the anglophone and les francophonie share little beyond a strange addiction to gravy sodden chips with cheese. “It has to be squeaky” I’m told in a bar “Squeaky Canadian cheese!” Actually the addiction isn’t strange, chips, gravy and cheese is clearly moorish but the civic pride in the dish of Poutine is truly astonishing. Without fail everyone I ask about Poutine drops instantly into unaffected raptures that would make Proust blush and hurry up dunking his madeleines. But beyond Poutine the divide is surprisingly deeply felt, though the remark “they don’t even speak proper French!” sounds tellingly like the withering remark of an old married couple.

On my last day in the city I also wander across a First Nations dance ceremony. First Nations because there are three indigenous communities who somehow lived here for hundreds of years without either chips or gravy. It’s hard to tell if the dancing, which has drawn a large crowd of tourists, is a ceremony for them or us. I’m jetlagged and walking through a dream and find something forlorn in the drumming of their feet on the burning tarmac of the car park of a multi-storey office block, the hot ground refusing to crack open to reveal the ancestral earth below.

These are not the only tribes I encounter in Montreal. Fantasia is a genre film festival founded in 1996 but the introduction of an international film market a few years ago has seen the event blossom into a near month long marathon of all that is weird, wonderful and bloody in international cinema. By the time I arrive the festival is in its last few days, the market has finished and no one has to dress up to look like a zombie. I turn up just in time to see the midnight screening of “TURBO KID” which played in SXSW with us. It’s a pastiche of ’80s sci-fi and video-nasties done with such total devotion and love that it is impossible not to fall in love with it in turn. Seeing this film play its home crowd is a whole other experience though, many of the cast are locals and their many and ingeniously gruesome deaths are met with whoops of delight. The rapturous response at the end is no surprise since the film got a standing ovation before it started. Something else happened before it started too – as the cinema lights dim the crowd start mewing like cats. This happens before every film at Fantasia, apparently a tradition that started out of admiration for the British animated series “Simon’s Cat” which played here a few years back. There are a couple of muttered complaints about this caterwauling but I’ve not felt many cinemas become so completely owned by their audience before.

“NINA FOREVER” is amongst the last films to play and the festival team are delighted and a little surprised by the size of our audience. I’m simply astonished. Awestruck. They applaud, they mew, they laugh, they give great gasps of shock at one point I’m not going to tell you about and they applaud all over again as the credits roll.

It is a tremendous honour to share our film with this audience, in this space which after three weeks has clearly become home. The psychogeography of Montreal is layered and complicated and makes more sense from the air but that room is very definitely free from the constraints of being either French or Canadian. That room belongs entirely to Mitch and whoever he is kind enough to invite to share it with him.

A very well deserved congratulations to all 14 members who have been shortlisted for The Grierson Trust awards 2015.

There are members in pretty much every category (obviously, no surprise there…)

Up for the ‘Best Documentary on a Contemporary Theme’ are Ruth Nicklin with Excluded: Kicked out of School Ep.1 and Brian Woods with Raining in my Heart. Brian is also looking at picking up the ‘Best Science or Natural History’ award for Curing Cancer.

Curing Cancer – Brian Woods

The success run for Laura Poitrais’ Citizenfour, distributed by SP and Britdoc’s Luke Moody, is still going strong – it’s up for ‘Best Documentary on a Contemporary Theme – International’. James Bluemel with The Romanians Are Coming is also in the running.

Shortlisted into the arts category is 20,000 Days On Earth, by Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard (also shortlisted for ‘Best Newcomer’). Ben Steele, who won ‘Best Documentary on Current Affairs’ last year, has another film up for the same award this year – Gypsy Matchmaker:

Everyone loves a little bit of history – this year Joanna Lipper with The Supreme Price is in the mix for ‘Best Historical Documentary’. In the ‘Best Entertaining Documentary’ category is Colin Rothbart‘s Dressed as a Girl, which premiered at BFI Flare earlier this year.

Virunga – Orlando Von Einsiedel

Up for the ‘Best Cinema Documentary’ award is Jesse Moss‘ The Overnighters. Also in this category is Oscar and BAFTA nominated Virunga, directed by long time SP member Orlando Von Einsiedel. We caught up with Orlando earlier this year – on top of his invaluable filmmaking career advice, he had a rather amusing story involving gorillas to tell.

In the ‘Best Newcomer’ category, members Chloe Fairweather with Mr Alzheimers and Me, and Andrew Hinton and Johnny Burke with Tashi and The Monk have both been shortlisted. The Wolf, The Ship and the Little Green Bag, by Kathryn MacCorgary Gray has been shortlisted for the ‘Best Student Documentary’ award.

Of course, they’re not out of the woods yet and nominations will be announced on Tuesday 15th September. 2015 has been such a strong year for documentaries, with much competition, so it’s a huge achievement to be shortlisted. Making SP proud guys – wishing you the best of luck.

Well look at that, not only are we suddenly something like half way through the year but we’re also deep into the middle of the East End Film Festival. Now in its 15th year the EEFF has become one of the capital’s most exhilarating sprints through everything exciting in contemporary filmmaking and this year has been no exception.

I’ve been meaning to post up some of the programme’s gems, including Deva Palmier’s fantastic short film “The Box”, however I’m late to the party and that film screened three days ago! Apologies.

Charlie Macgechan & Francesca Dale in Dee Meaden’s “Sibling”

Luckily though you still have a chance to see “Sibling” by the luminously gifted Dee Meaden which screens as part of “Shorts: Running In The Family” on the 8th July at 9pm in the Genesis. This is Dee’s third short and again she displays her skill at creating an atmosphere so dense you can almost see the intense tension between the characters.

The Genesis is also host, on the 9th of July, to the world premiere of “Containment” directed by Neil McEnery-West and written by David Lemon. I’ve not yet had a chance to see this film but it’s one of those “it” projects were great talents on the independent circuit come together across a sublime idea. It’s definitely always struck me as one of those indie films with real break-out potential.

And though the festival is built around a celebration of contemporary filmmaking I couldn’t go without mentioning a screening of Sydney J Furie’s outstanding adaptation of Len Deighton’s “The Ipcress File” which plays 4pm on the 9th at the Genesis. This is simply the most perfect spy movie that has ever been made and if you have any plans for Thursday afternoon less important than a matter of national security you really should cancel them. This screening is free for the over 60s and a must for anyone who just can’t get over the 60s.

See you there.