Festivals and Events

It’s a busy time in festival world and the Mydy team has been spreading itself thin trying to cover screenings and events. High-up on our list of not-to-be-missed fests is the unfailingly excellent Bristol-based Encounters Short Film Festival. Our two-people strong delegation was sent, and after having worked our way through the entire Watershed men and the 9 series of competitive shorts, we were able to sit down and put our thoughts on paper. Encounters celebrates the breadth of styles (…)

Now in its tenth year, the British Urban Film Festival aims to celebrate and promote independent, urban cinema in the UK. This year BUFF will have free masterclasses (in addition to its usual lineup for all the budding filmmakers hoping to be selected for future festivals) and short films online. BUFF Previews: Still Water (2014) isn’t at all urban but brings a bit of fantasy to the festival in a beautifully shot mermaid story. In the future androids aren’t just freeing us from labour, (…)

Years ago, in 10th grade, my World History Ms Coehlo explained the nonsensical nature of the Holocaust being that they weren’t really another race, they were German. At the time, all I could think of was myself and I interpreted this statement as racism being okay only if you’re really dealing with another race. Now, remembering this story I think of ‘folk’ notions of race. It’s common that people use race, ethnicity and nationality interchangeably and believe in the biological truth of (…)

As Hollywood’s fiscal calculations ensure it pumps out sequels, prequels and trilogies (some disguised as ‘new content’), the Remake Film Festival tried out a different relationship between old box office hits and current day moviemaking. Filmmakers across the globe were invited to reimagine, reinterpret or remake scenes from classical Hollywood movies – specifically Psycho, Casablanca and Singing in the Rain. The premise immediately brings to mind the fantastic and fantastical films in (…)

The London Feminist Film Festival (20th-23rd August 2015) is a celebration of international feminist films past and present, established ‘to support women filmmakers in the male-dominated film industry and to inspire feminist discussion and critique.’ The programme includes a documentary about female hip-hop artists in the UK, an event to raise funds for Rape Crisis England and Wales, a series of feminist shorts, and a screening of ‘feminist classic’ The Company of Strangers, followed by a (…)

The Encounters Festival team have recently issued their press release! This is what awaits us in September: Encounters launches series of new public events for audiences in 2015 Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival returns to Bristol from 15th to 20th September. This year audiences can expect five days of the best short films from 35 countries alongside a series of special big screen events, a comprehensive industry programme and FREE public screenings for all the family. As (…)

Soror is the latest short film from Driftwood writer/director James Webber and producer Roxanne Holman. The film stars Rosie Day, Sian Breckin, James Alexandrou, and Kate Dickie. "Soror explores the lives and relationships of two half-sisters; Grace, insular and shy but a talented dancer; and Lisa, who dreams of escaping the confines of their upbringing. The close relationship shared by the sisters is the most important part of their lives; the only thing that truly means anything." It will (…)

East End Film Festival 2015: Crumbs (Miguel Llansó) Last October, the Guardian’s Africa Correspondent David Smith wrote a profile of Ethiopia, 30 years on from its infamous famine. Smith describes a country of ‘frenetic urban expansion’, ‘an Orwellian surveillance state, breathtaking in scale and scope’. Crumbs, a post-apocalypse vision of Ethiopia from writer-director Miguel Llansó, shows us a country laid to waste. In the words of the apocryphal literary quotation that serves as a (…)

As a black American living in London nothing grates on me like being asked where my parents, grandparents or great-grandparents are from. This is the inevitable follow-up question which accompanies the initial enquiry into where I’m from, to which I reply "California". It’s not the fact of being asked that grates on me—I get it, I’m a foreigner. Added to which I was also raised in what was, at the time, a white suburb, and new black arrivals from acceptable black places like Oakland or East (…)

During her 1972 presidential campaign, politician Shirley Chisholm was questioned about her willingness to work with the Black Panther Party. Chisholm responded that rather than focusing on the Panthers themselves, the nation should consider the conditions that created them. In his eighth film to premiere at Sundance, writer and director Stanley Nelson Jr makes a similar point, but unfortunately doesn’t delve deeply into these conditions. Audiences already engaged with discourses on race and (…)