Author: |Posted: 00:20 on 23/11/08
Category: FourDocs competition, film funding
We got lots of very high quality entries to the FourDocs bursary scheme. After looking through the applications I was totally impressed with the dedication of people who get out there and actually make films, instead of talking about it.
Some people had been filming a subject for years, others became so obsessed with an idea they just had to make it, and another decided to make a personal investigation about their heritage into a film. What we were looking for, as stated in the T’s & C’s, was strong visual ideas that stand a good chance of being selected at film festivals. We had a difficult time with the judging, because there were so many deserving projects that £1,000 would really help elevate. In the end, we actually decided to give to out eight bursaries to films that were all fairly advanced (ie most of the filming had already happened), made by filmmakers with a broad range of backgrounds, including artists and an actor, as well as seasoned doc makers. read more
Author: |Posted: 15:02 on 28/10/08
Category: festivals, film funding
Last night I went to the BFI to watch some shorts funded through various schemes associated with Film London.
My favourite far and away was Bevan Walsh’s nostalgically humorous Love Does Grow on Trees, which I’d actually already seen when it won Best Newcomer Award at Rushes Soho Shorts Festival. (One liner description: a teenage boy’s lust and desire for pornography in a world before the Internet.) This caused a few murmurs in the audience afterwards, because it was emphatically stated that the slate of films were all worldwide premiers.
New talent investment is a funny thing. Organisations give money to people to make films and find their directing voice, and mostly come back with perfectly acceptable safe films that seem professional enough but challenge nothing. This means they can’t be seen as ‘failures’, but is this the same as a success story? read more
