Abel Ferrara’s Pasolini opens in the dark: the Italian director is interviewed in French, in sunglasses, in a smoky room, in 1975, about Salò, or the 120 Days of Sodom, which is the last film he will make. Pier Paolo Pasolini appears suave and (…) Continue Reading »

Ahead of Bristol’s Encounters Festival, Ryan Ormonde talks with Richard Williams, the award-winning animator, most famous as director of animation on the technically ground-breaking Who Framed Roger Rabbit. Encounters will be screening his new (…) Continue Reading »

For more on the Feminist Film Fest, check out filmmaker and Leonore Schick’s blog article... "The London Feminist Film Festival It Happened Here trigger warning: sexual assault, sexual violence, rape. Initially, I only planned to go along to the Shorts screening. But my friend Emma who does the Resonance radio show with me said we should go along to a documentary about rape on US (…) Continue Reading »

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 (…) Continue Reading »

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 (…) Continue Reading »

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; (…) Continue Reading »

Forget CGI, we’re rejoicing in the sensuous pleasures of cardboard and burlap in some of the more ambiguous yet fantastical pro-filmic constructions. Welcome to pasteboard paradise! 5. The Singing Ringing Tree (Francesco Stefani,1957) In this Technicolor kingdom barren trees are laden with silver curling ribbon, giant mechanized goldfish live in frozen lakes and artificial orange coral (…) Continue Reading »

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 (…) Continue Reading »

Earlier this month, filmmaker and academic Winnie M. Li and psychologist Dr. Nina Burrows presented Clear Lines: ‘the first ever festival dedicated to talking about sexual assault and consent through the arts and discussion’. This programme included a double bill of films (Brave Miss World and The Unspeakable Crime: Rape) in which rape survivors tell their stories. If we understand these two (…) Continue Reading »

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, (…) Continue Reading »