The Motion Plymouth festival continues in earnest this evening as the Young Motion Plymouth competition winners are announced at Vue Cinema’s glittering invitation-only gala awards ceremony.
There will be gongs for Animation, Music, Plymouth and Open categories,
as well as prizes for the best collective entry, best funded film and best
younger filmmakers.
Special guest at the awards ceremony will be Alan Lee, who won an Oscar in 2004 for his concept design scribbles on The Return Of The King.
Motion Plymouth’s Katie Thompson told D+CFilm: “We’ve been working with Plymouth City Council’s Children’s Services all year to develop this competition for the city’s school children.
“It’s been a way for the children to work on literacy, media literacy, citizenship and many other subjects in the curriculum.
“As organisers of Motion Plymouth, it’s been very exciting for us to have created this event and the quality of work from the young people in the city has been fantastic and truly out of this world. We’re going to treat the young filmmakers like they stars they truly are.”
Stay tuned to D+CFilm this week for more Motion Plymouth shenanigans.
Nicholas Roeg, legendary lenser of classic flicks like Don’t Look Now and The Man Who Fell To Earth, is in Exeter tomorrow (that’s Tuesday, diary snoggers) to yap about and show his new movie Puffball.
The screening will be introduced by Don Boyd, a visiting professor of film studies, who will also host the post-film discussion, when the audience can put their incredibly facile questions to the master director.
Let’s hope Roeg doesn’t turn out to be a dwarf with a kitchen knife ‘by mistake’, eh viewers?
This year’s Motion Plymouth festival kicks off today (that’s Monday, calendar frotters!) with a ‘best of the fest’-style shindig at the city’s Barbican B-bar at 9pm.
The event, hosted by missing-presumed-dead indie film club Openreel,
will feature a selection of the best works entered into last year’s Motion Plymouth festival.
Films include a documentary on biker gangs, a piece about wartime evacuees,
a mobile phone medical study, a romantic monochrome music video and two dance pieces.
In short, there’ll be something for everyone - especially all you dancing evacuee gang member doctors (big-up the dancing evacuee gang member doctors in
da house!).
Stay tuned to D+CFilm this week for more Motion Plymouth shenanigans.
War On Terror wheeze Lions For Lambs is released this week and to celebrate we have a short interview with director Robert Redford. Click below to watch the trailer.
Did making this movie feel a bit like returning to the Hollywood of the Seventies, with your political films, like All The President’s Men?
Robert Redford: It’s not really like a return to the Seventies. I don’t think you can ever return to times that went before. And really there’s no Hollywood anymore, producing their own films and distributing them, so now you’d have to call it just the mainstream. There’s more investment capital available now to finance the films that the studios distribute, so there are a lot more films out there. And the mainstream mainly follows trends, rather than setting them, so the trend now is that you can criticise this administration, because it has tanked in terms of popularity. That makes it a little easier, while four or five years ago, if you said anything against the administration you were labelled unpatriotic.
So it’s definitely becoming easier to get these films made…
It’s a little easier, but what’s not easier is to get these kinds of films financed, because they’re considered risky commercial ventures. So that time of the Seventies has gone. This film was never meant to be solely about the war. It’s about something different that contains the war as one element.
The Tom Cruise character, Senator Irving, in Lions For Lambs could have been this very black and white villain…
That would be agit-propaganda and I don’t believe in that. It would have been easy to talk about and criticise this administration, because it’s in a pretty bad way right now but I felt that there are deeper ways of looking at it, which is that we all have some responsibility here, all of us — the public, students, the media — we should look at this in a broader and deeper way. The point of the Tom Cruise character is that the thing that would make him dangerous is that he would just give us a better-dressed version of what we have now. Considering what’s happened to our country over the last six years, the idea was to present him as someone who had an all-American quality, someone who would be popular, strong and dangerous. But if you had made him a moustache-twirling villain he wouldn’t be dangerous.
So he had to give a point of view that’s acceptable?
All the characters had to do that. The student that I’m talking to in the film says that why should he feel guilty just because his parents have worked hard to give him a better life and he’s just out there enjoying it? Tom Cruise’s character says that it doesn’t matter whether decisions made in the past are right or wrong, we have a problem now. And he’s got a point. He wants to win, but then you think why does he want to win? The scene had to twist and turn, but that couldn’t happen unless he had a genuine point of view, so as hard it is, if you go to some conservative states in America, down in Dallas and in Texas, and show this film, they’d back the senator.
Were you concerned that having apparent Democratic sympathies might lead some people to see this film as a PR coup?
Yes, I always presumed that would be the case. Considering where we are — right now the right-wing bloggers are talking about it even though they haven’t seen it — it’ll be considered a left-wing film.
Elizabeth-Jane Baldry (fairy folklore expert, harpist extrodanaire and filmmaker) got in touch with us from a Chicago airport to tell us about her submission to The View From Here, and that she is playing a harp accompaniment to a 1924 feature length silent film of Peter Pan preceeded by a discussion with actor Paul McGann. It takes place on November 25 in Bristol and December 16 at the Barbican, in London.
But if you want to catch the hip harpist, pop along to the Blue Walnut on Walnut Street in Torquay on Sunday, November 18, for your own special recital.
The Blue Walnut just happens to be another venue for a View From Here, featuring films by Peter Calyless (Monday, November 26) and Vicky Smith (Thursday, November 29).
A group of filmmakers called WasProject are taking part in the Village Screen elements of The View From Here. These prolific youngsters have been getting down and making films for a while and have plenty to show for it. Just to whet your appetite, here’s the buzzing ident. Of course we’ll be bringing your more over time - or you could pop along to Hensford Farm (near Dawlish) on Wednesday November 28. And of course, stay tuned for more info.
The time is running out for submissions to South Devon’s premiere movie event, the View From Here: a celebration of moving image in South Devon. There’s plenty of opportunity to get your work out there in front of an audience – whether it’s at the innovative Half Hour Pint mini festival around pubs in Newton Abbot, or the gala event at Coombeshead Theatre.
Katie Thompson from Motion Plymouth (via Motiongrafik, if you’re into family trees) speaks to Devon and Cornwall Film (via Art in Devon, if anyone’s asking).
Elizabeth-Jane Baldry (fairy folklore expert, harpist extrodanaire and filmmaker) got in touch with us from a Chicago airport to tell us about her submission to 
