LIDF

It was refreshing to sit in the reclaimed Horse Hospital building in Bloomsbury last night and enjoy some UK shorts. As Festival Director Patrick Hazard explained, there sadly haven’t been enough UK features to dominate at our venues, but there are an abundance of exciting short pieces. The films were all between five and twenty minutes long, meaning the evening was fantastically varied and stimulating.

Part 1 of this evening started with the unlisted, quirky and timely ‘Credit Crunch’, which featured individuals giving sound bytes about their most personal possession, their purse, with stories entertaining and touching forming along the way, despite the owners of the purses not being pictured. James Newton’s ‘The Space You Leave’ (2009) was even more affecting, telling the personal stories of mothers and fathers and their families left in a limbo of unknowing when their children, in this case their sons, disappear without trace.  Neither of the mothers, expressing their feelings of loss, could bear to look at the camera, although Tim Reilly, whose son has been missing for far longer, and whom was featured in another documentary last year, could look at us directly and imploringly and enquire about his son.

‘The Moscow Correspondence’ was a piece of serendipity. Director Lottie Gammon was sent by her film school to Moscow to make a film about journalism. Just as she had started to make friends with and forma dialogue at critical paper The Moscow Correspondent, it was unceremoniously shut down. What follows is an intriguing portrait of human resilience and humour in the face of adversity, as well as the disturbing background image of the manipulative super-rich who manipulate our media (owner Lebedev, selling the Moscow Correspondent due to an apparent lack of funds, bought the London Evening Standard not three months later, suggesting the sudden revoking of the journalists right to work or earn compensation when made redundant was more down to the owner’s dislike of the content of their ‘freedom of speech’ stories.)

‘The Ghostvillage Project’ and ‘Hi High Rise’ were two pieces that also changed the tone. ‘The Ghostvillage Project’ (2009) documented the latest project of the graffiti-art group Agents of Change, changing an abandoned concrete village, built for but never lived in by oil workers and their families in Scotland, into an innovative art gallery that substantially changed the tone of the local eyesore. ‘Hi High Rise’ (2010), excitingly shot entirely on a digital SLR and using the stills to create animated sequences showing life inside the tower block, also worked to change common perceptions of the residents of high rise blocks, interestingly by only using the voices of those who lived in the Hornchurch Court block in Manchester and images of it from different angles, forcing the viewer to literally alter their normal perception. And ‘London Vampires’(2009)…actually did nothing really to alter the classic stereotypical view of those who like to imagine themselves drinkers of blood and residents of the between-spaces of London, but still proved insightful into those stereotypes.

The panel with ‘London Vampires’’ Trevor Hargreaves, Lottie Gammon, TAPE, aka Jan Dixon and Emily Dixon who also live in the towerblock they filmed for ‘Hi High Rise’, and artist and director Timid of Agents of Change, in conversation with Patrick Hazard, was an intimate affair that really allowed the audience to hear the stories behind the stories, and despite Part 2 of the evening’s audience straining to get in, the conversation flowed. This was such an exciting event, although hopefully next year there will also be more UK features for the Festival to screen to similarly-excited crowds.