Thursday 4 March 2010

Borderlines Film Festival 2010...

Find out more about the festival here:

http://www.borderlinesfilmfestival.co.uk/

On Saturday February 27th we had our screening of "Gaia", "The Rapture", "All Things Are Connected" (three of the five portions that make up "Gaia & Genesis") and "Doing Our Bit" (our entry for last year's One Minute To Save The World filmmaking competition).

From the website concerning locally produced films:

"Shell Shock is just one among a cluster of films showing at Borderlines this year that were made locally. Still Life is a strikingly ambitious drama made by The Rural Media Company with members of the community in Bromyard while Gaia: all things are connected consists of two thoughtful and visually exciting short films on the future of our environment from Herefordshire film-maker Joe Jenkins."

The drive there (the screening was at the Hereford Courtyard theatre) wasn't much fun being that it was torrential rain and the roads are all still littered with potholes after January's hellishly cold bout of persistent snow ... and then the parking ticket machine had the cheek to take my £1.10 and not give me a ticket, and the other one (that actually worked) wouldn't give me change, so it stole a further 10p from me ... my guess is that the ticket machines are working for the government, stealing money from innocent civilians so that it can go towards paying off our nation's ludicrously gigantic debt.

Anyway, the night before the screening I'd be thinking "oh geez, please let there be more than two people there", so I was pleasantly surprised when I found out the theatre had been almost sold out!

The screening itself went well, having already met the nice folks we'd been liasing with in the lead-up to the screening, and there was lots of positive feedback after the show when we met members of the audience and discussed the films and the filmmaking process behind them in some depth.

So it was a positive atmosphere with the audience all enjoying the films on show. It's always nice to get a boost like that as a struggling filmmaker, because at times it can appear bleak - in this early stage in one's career - however, it's really a nice boost to your confidence when you get a good turn-out at a screening and the people respond positively.

As for the drive back, there wasn't so much rain, but there was hellish traffic leaving Hereford - which is notoriously clogged with traffic most of the time - and of course having learned the layout of the potholes on the road driving towards Hereford, the drive back would naturally have an entirely new layout of potholes to avoid, ha!

You can also view the festival's Flickr photostream here:

http://www.flickr.com/photos/41085820@N04/

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