We’re picking up some of the tremors of excitement about the Flipside Film Festival (you may have noticed the six stories this week). But with such a smorgesbord of events, how do you decide? We got in touch with organiser Dan Paolantonio to find out what’s pressing his ‘play’ button.

“I’m massively excited about the Don Letts event. Although we’ve had some amazing film artists screening their works in Plymouth over the last couple of years, we’ve really had no-one with the truly global profile of Don Letts. And films are only a part of his repertoire too. He has arguably been the catalyst for some of the most creatively explosive pop-cultural collisions of the last quarter of a century, his influence extending into just about every artistic area imaginable.

“What I really love about his work is that it always seems so individual - never the straight-ahead, generic way of approaching subject matter, always a twist, a different take, a different technique. In his film Punk: Attitude, he referred to the essence of punk (my words) being the turning of problems into advantages, using restriction as a creatively empowering force. I love the (true) democracy of that idea, its enabling, empowering aspect. Throughout his life he seems always to have forged new ground in whatever he turned his hand to - definitely someone I hold in very high regard, and not just as a film-maker either.

“I’m also really thrilled that Tony Hill has agreed to show a selection of his film work - another film artist with a truly international reputation. His films are truly incredible - presenting the world around us in unfamiliar and thought provoking ways, forcing us to truly contemplate, and look, rather than just charging through life with the dreaded white headphones plugged in. That’s just scratching the surface though - his films are about so much more than that, but have in common their ability to transport the viewer inside cinema as something to be experienced rather than just passively watched - waiting for the next predictable M Knight Shyamalan plot twist.”

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This entry was posted on Saturday, May 3rd, 2008 at 8:33 am and is filed under Festivals/Events, Local, News . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.