Oceanic Global Film Festival winner

‘Dive Tierra Bomba Dive‘, the second film I have commissioned/execed directed by Joya Berrow & Lucy Jane, the dynamic duo who go under the name The Right to Roam, has been selected as one of the four winners of the Oceanic Global Film Festival. It is centred on a young woman who aspires to lead the fight to protect the marine environment of her native island off the cost of Colombia.

The film received a special screening (with director Q&A) on Earth X TV last week.

Lucy & Joya

Vimeo Staff Picked

The first film we worked on together was ‘Surf Girls Jamaica‘. It was recently spotlighted by The Guardian 

This Real Stories podcast is a good listen about the making of Surf Girls.

Projects

Moving the office archive recently I crossed paths again with numerous projects I’ve commissioned and worked on which are fading in my memory so I’ve decided to build a list here for posterity…

• My Healthchecker
• My Mindchecker
• My Molechecker
• Bedtime Live (2012)
• Healthfreaks (2013) 
• Every Object Tells a Story (2004)
• ORIGINATION (10/04)
• Origination: Insite (Culture Online) (Q1 2005)
• Lost Generation
• My Movie Mashup
• Germ (viral videos incl. ICA exhibition)
• The Human Footprint – a life in numbers (interactive module)
• PIXnMIX (Nov 2004) The Candy Jar
• TexTips 4Lovers, 4Karma, 4Mates, Islamic Inspiration, 4Change etc.
• Lust4Life / Ten Years Younger
• (Chancers) (urban talent search, Ras Kwame 12/04)
• Ideasfactory
• Omagh
• Digital Africa
• Time Team Big Dig
• (Big Roman Dig) (2005)
• (Jamie’s School Dinners)
• Jamie’s Dreamschool
• (New Shoots)
• Famelab
• Rolling Stock
• My Shakespeare (RADA)
• X (Q1 2005)
• Breaking the News
• Make Tracks
• Webit (Ideasfactory website competition for 13-19s 12/04)
• Interactive Christmas card (tangerine)
• The Unteachables
• 121 (2006)
• The Play’s The Thing
• Drugs SFV pilot (which came first)
• Sexperience
• The Sexperience 1000
• The Showbiz Baby Name Generator (10/04)
• Parents Screw You Up 
• Stephen Fry’s 100 Greatest Gadgets (6/11)
• Poll Vault pilot
• Bollywood Star (9/04)
• Big Art Project
• [Creative Archive Licence]
• Britain’s Big Share (pilot)

 

Coincidences No.s 208, 209 and 210 – Sussex

Coincidence No. 208 – Kemptown

I’m sitting at this café in Kemptown, Brighton when I hear a familiar voice. I look round and the face is familiar too. I ask this young woman: “Excuse me but do you have some kind of clothes business in Camden Town? were are you in a film a while ago? “ At first Camden Town doesn’t ring much of a bell with her and I say sorry my mistake. Then she suddenly realises that she took premises temporarily in Camden Town sometime ago and that she is the woman I’m thinking of. She was in a documentary I commissioned a couple of years ago about psychedelics. I know her voice and face not from any direct contact but because I heard and saw her over and over in the editing process.

I didn’t even know she had anything to do with Brighton and associated her with Camden Town and somewhere up north where her accent comes from. 

Coincidence No. 209 – Saltdean & Lewes

My old friend N comes to visit me in Brighton. First thing in the morning I take him to Saltdean for a swim (which is something of an adventure as he hasn’t swum in UK waters for over two decades, he prefers hotter climes). As we walk to the beach we pass the Lido (opened by Tarzan (Johnny Weissmuller) in 1938). “What does Lido actually mean?” asks N (i.e. specifically). “Is it always like this?” I say that I think it’s usually a 1930s large open-air pool like this, although I was taken to Ruislip Lido as a child and that, from memory, was more of a lake.

a public open-air swimming pool or bathing beach 

At N’s request we go to Lewes in the afternoon in search of a second-hand bookshop. We go to the excellent Bow Windows in the high street. We browse, masked up, in the stifling heatwave heat. I examine a Graham Greene novel, one of the first books I lift from the shelf (are you allowed to actually lift books in the Covid era?). It is The Comedians (1966) set in Haiti. The hotel in the story is called Hotel Lido.

I speak to Enfant Terrible No. 2 in the evening. I ask what he’s been doing with his day in this heat. He has been down to Crouch End Lido he informs me, which is full of “old people” (i.e. 30 plus) doing lanes and, post-Lockdown, none of the young yahoos that used to be there seem to have registered the reopening, all of which pleases him.

Coincidence No. 209b – Saltdean & London

Walking beside Saltdean Lido to the beach I notice the name of the makers of the old pale blue iron railings sloping down to the pedestrian tunnel: J. Every, Lewes

At the spot where I normally park in front of our house in London N2 is a metal plate by the drain. It is made by J. Every, Lewes. The drain itself is made by J. Gibb & Co. Ltd., London. Why did London Borough of Barnet go all the way to Lewes for its drain stuff?

Coincidence No. 210 – Rottingdean

I am starting to read the new novel by Ali Smith, Summer. It just came out a few days ago and I have read and enjoyed Spring and Autumn (the latter for our book group which is where I first came across her). I read these sentences: 

She already knows she is never going to have children. Why would you bring a child into a catastrophe? It would be like giving birth to a child in a prison cell. 

This last sentence reminds me of a programme I heard a few days before on BBC Radio 4 about women giving birth in prison. I remember that I was approaching the traffic lights in Rottingdean when I was listening to it. Rottingdean is the village beside where I now live much of the time in Brighton.

Then comes the next sentence which I have not yet read or glimpsed:

And Brighton’s a good place, one of the best in the country for green things, the only place in the whole of the UK with a green MP

I had no idea the novel was set in Brighton until that moment. This sentence is the first reference to it.

A Canadian academy award for ‘Take Me To Prom’

‘Take Me to Prom‘, the glittery creation of Canadian director Andrew Moir, won the Best Short Documentary award at the recent Canadian Screen Awards run by the Academy of Canadian Cinema & Television.

I co-commissioned the film at Real Stories (Little Dot Studios, alongside my colleague Alex Hryniewicz) with Lesley Birchard at CBC (Canadian national broadcaster). The film is very much Andrew’s baby – he had a clear vision and he drove it through with absolute confidence in what was in his head.

The film revisits the iconic North American adolescent milestone of High School Prom through interviews with LGBTQ people ranging in age from 17 to 88, showing how things have moved on over seven decades (there is one representative of each decade).

It is currently Short of the Week (on Short of the Week).

We also co-commissioned the charming Finding Fukue as a CBC-Real Stories Original. I believe it holds the record for CBC Short Docs viewing on their YouTube channel (6.5M views and climbing). It’s a very different documentary to Prom but equally high quality – directed by Jessica Stuart.

In Your Face wins Best Documentary in Lockdown Showcase

As mentioned in the recent Teach us rightly to number our days post, In Your Face, a mid-form documentary I conceived and commissioned for Real Stories/Little Dot Studios, directed and produced by my friend & colleague Simon Goodman of Showem Entertainment who worked his usual magic on the format, won Best Documentary in the Lockdown Short Film Showcase run by London Short Film. The standard of the showcase was very high with such excellent films as The Call Centre and UB-13.

Here’s a short Q&A I recorded in lockdown for the showcase:

[8 min watch]

 

 

Athena Skates

This is my 2nd commission for Red Bull Media House. Athena Skates is an uplifting film spotlighting a new generation of empowered Athenian women.

As Athens tentatively emerges from a decade of chaos, a group of young female roller skaters are fighting for space in their city. This new generation of Greeks grew up with few opportunities – but this taught them a valuable lesson: if you want to follow your passion, you have to do it yourself. While support and infrastructure for young people fell victim to the crisis, the girls are using roller skating to create their own community and express themselves.

Athena Skates is a filmic journey through the hidden skate spots and urban wastelands which punctuate this ancient metropolis. In the process, it shows what it means to be a young woman in Greece today and why finding a way to do what you love – despite the challenges – matters now more than ever.

At a time when so many are stuck indoors, Athena Skates is a liberating, dynamic film revelling in the freedom to move through your city and create your own space within it. The film opens in the spectacular location of the abandoned Hellinikon international airport as the sun sets over the Saronic Gulf. The skaters set off on a high-energy journey across the gritty concrete jungle that is Athens, culminating at the top of Mount Lycabettus, as the sunrise ushers in a new day – and a new generation.

Athena Skates was produced by Hijra Collective, London for Red Bull Media House, London & Salzburg – part of an initiative I have been running focused on excellent storytelling applied to human interest documentaries. Athena Skates is directed by London-based Elliott Gonzo, an outstanding young voice, distinctive and original, working in the realms of commercials, drama and documentary.

They Saw The Sun First [video - 8 mins]

Here is the first of my commissions for Red Bull Media House:

Directed by Stefan Hunt, an Aussie based in Brooklyn. Music by French multi-instrumentalist composer/performer FKJ. Movement directed by Vanessa Marian.

With city dwellers locked down across the world under the most trying of circumstances, They Saw The Sun First is a ray of light, an oasis of inspiration and uplift in the form of a highly original and beautifully crafted film. It is a genre-bending documentary using dance and physicality to explore themes of youthfulness, fear, regret and aging. The star of the show is New York, the metropolis itself.

The perspectives of elderly citizens of NYC are interpreted physically by younger generations through movement and dance. The words come from real-life interviews recorded with a diverse selection of aging New Yorkers. Each dancer was given a voice to interpret (without ever meeting the owner of that voice) through dance, movement, emotive states and space. Movement Director Vanessa Marian led this aspect of the film.

The film focuses on our commonalities as opposed to our differences. The director, Stefan Hunt, seeks to address this current age of echo chambers, divisive rhetoric and a deepening chasm between generations. It reframes what it means to listen to our elders. The title derives from an old African proverb:

“What older people say is not to be dishonoured – after all, they saw the sun first.”

They Saw The Sun First was produced by Fresh Film Productions, New York for Red Bull Media House, London & Salzburg – part of an initiative I have been heading up focused on excellent storytelling applied to human interest documentaries.

The music is specially composed by FKJ, the award-winning and much followed French multi-instrumentalist and singer, who is renowned for his solo live performances (featuring his multi-instrument skills through live loops) at music festivals like Coachella. He rewrote his track ‘Ylang Ylang’ for the film.

Stefan Hunt’s directing journey began in 2006 when he decided to travel through the USA in an ice-cream truck, armed with a camera and child-like resolve to cast an eye on all 50 states. He says of the film: “With all my grandparents gone, I felt a real lack of eldership in my life. I feel like we are bombarded with these authoritative opinions from young people on the internet, but where is the advice of those who have walked this earth the longest?”

The way I see it this uplifting and original film comes out just when the world needs it – it reminds us what makes life’s inevitable struggles ultimately worthwhile and strengthening.

David v Goliath

This is Victoria Mapplebeck, director, and me tanked up on free Taittinger above the Thames, overlooking the dome of St Paul’s, the Walkie-Talkie, the Cheesegrater and other great London landmarks. It is the Nominees Party for the BAFTA TV Awards which this year are in at least one respect a landmark in themselves thanks to a new award being presented in two weeks’ time.

It is significant that the newest category for the TV BAFTA Awards is Short Form Programme, marking the passage of online digital video into the mainstream of television. This year is the second year of the category and the first year Little Dot has entered. (Last year I was involved in the judging of the inaugural awards because I knew I might well have conflicts of interest thereafter).

Also significant is the nomination we were delighted to receive at the end of last month in this category for our Real Stories Original ‘Missed Call’. The rest of the nominations list is filled entirely with BBC productions. So that’s a broadcasting Goliath up, not against another broadcaster, large media owner or brand, but a privately held UK indie which invested its hard-earned cash in original unscripted content.

To date Little Dot has commissioned two dozen factual originals (that was the task I was brought in to do) and they are starting to make their mark in a rich mix of ways.

As well the BAFTA recognition, ‘Missed Call’ won the Social Media category of the AHRC Research in Film awards, one of only five categories. These spotlit the critical role of research in film-making, a vital aspect which rarely gets the limelight. The 19-minute documentary premiered in London’s West End at Open City Docs where it was nominated for Best UK Short Film. It was selected as a Finalist at the iPhone Film Festival, reflecting the fact it was shot entirely on an iPhone X, the first professional documentary made on the device. It won the Best UK Film Award at the Super Shorts London Film Festival, and has shown at a variety of film festivals.

Some of the Real Stories Originals have played well in online realms, such as ‘Sorry I Shot You’, a documentary on restorative justice in action, which was in the Official Selection of the Webdance Film Festival; ‘Finding Fukue’, a co-commission with CBC in Toronto, which won Best Film at the National Screen Institute of Canada Online Short Film Festival; and ‘Travelling on Trash’ which won a Gold Award at the Spotlight Documentary Film Festival.

Others have enjoyed an on-the-ground life across the globe in festivals from Queensland, Australia (‘Through the Eyes of Children’) via Oakland, California (‘Black Star’ at Black Arts Movement (BAM!) Film Festival) to Sheffield, England (‘Surf Girls Jamaica’, which picked up a Best Women in Adventure Film award).

One of the most pleasing pieces of Real Stories Original silverware was winning the Best British Film gong at the London Surf Film Festival. Who knew? London’s got plenty going for it but the pounding of the waves is but a distant dream. Now that BAFTA is a not so distant dream – the ceremony is on Sunday 12th May (on BBC1 hosted by Graham Norton) and whether it’s David or Goliath’s night the Real Stories team will enjoy the ride…

Missed Call was directed by Victoria Mapplebeck and produced by Amanda Murphy (Field Day) :: Sorry I Shot You was directed by Andy Mundy-Castle (DocHearts) :: Travelling on Trash was produced by Deborah Charles (The Distillery London) :: Through the Eyes of Children was directed & produced by James Lingwood (Big Pond) :: Surf Girls Jamaica was directed & produced by Joya Berrow & Lucy Jane (Right to Roam) :: Black Star was directed and produced by Sameer Patel :: Finding Fukue was directed by Daniel Roher & Edmund Stenson and produced by Felicity Justrabo.

Surf Girls Jamaica – out tomorrow

My latest commission for Real Stories is released tomorrow (6pm GMT).

 

Square Root of Instagram

In 2006 at Channel 4 (London) I commissioned a mobile-centred website called Big Art Mob. It enabled users to publish photos of Public Art (from sculptures to graffiti) from their mobile phones. In other words, it was basically Instagram 4 years before Instagram was invented. It was created with digital all-rounder Alfie Dennen (father of We Are Not Afraid) using a photo-publishing platform he had developed with partners named Moblog. I had been experimenting with Moblog for 18 months when a TV project about Public Art (The Big Art Project) came over the horizon and it struck me as an ideal place to apply Moblog technology.

The main difference from Instagram is that Big Art Mob’s photos were not in square format.

Today I went to see the Klimt / Schiele exhibition at the Royal Academy of Arts, London. I have been a big admirer of Schiele since I heard about him from David Bowie on a radio programme around the time Lodger was released (1979). At the time the Austrian painter was little known outside cognoscenti circles (eg the Marlborough Gallery in London). I was taught a little by Frank Whitford at Cambridge who wrote the Phaidon monograph on Schiele. And I won a travel scholarship at Girton to go study his work in Vienna around 1984. Last year while working at ORF in Vienna I got to do a bit of a self-shaped Schiele tour to mark the centenary of his death which I wrote about in On The Trail of Egon Schiele. I even had a stab at a Schiele in a painting class I recently attended locally:

The exhibition was excellent, bringing out the contrast between how and why Schiele and his mentor Klimt drew. Along the way it reminded me of Klimt’s distinctive adoption of the square format in his portrait painting. Which got me thinking about which other artists went square.

Portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer I by Gustav Klimt (1903-1907)

Klimt’s famous portrait of Adele Bloch-Bauer is 1.38m by 1.38m. It was commissioned by Ferdinand Bloch-Bauer, a Jewish banker and sugar producer, husband of Adele. The painting was notoriously stolen by the Nazis in 1941 and displayed at Schloss Belvedere in Vienna, until being returned by the Austrian courts to Bloch-Bauer’s heirs in 2006 at which point it found a new home in New York. It is considered the zenith of Klimt’s golden period. It uses Klimt’s trademark technique of cropping the figure top and bottom to create a pillar through the canvas, here set slightly right to allow the bulk of the patterned dress or aura to balance the composition.

Square and portraits reminded me of the excellent Hockney exhibition at Tate Britain last year. The square format works particularly well in the double portraits which were the beating heart of that show.

My Parents by David Hockney (1977)

The emotionally resonant My Parents is 1.83m by 1.83m, even more epic than the Klimt, yet with the most down-to-earth subjects. Each parent occupies their own half in a very different way – attentive mum, square on, in her own space; pre-occupied dad, at an angle, overlapping the furniture – subtly capturing the difference in parent-child relationship.

Hockney was born on 9th July 1937, eight days before my dad. Nine days later another German Jew, Gerda Taro, died in Spain. She has the tragic distinction of being the first female photojournalist to have been killed while covering war at the frontline. This evening I started watching My Private War for this year’s BAFTA judging, starring Rosamund Pike as Marie Colvin, a latter day Taro. Recently, also for voting purposes (BAFTA Documentary Film chapter), I watched the feature documentary Under The Wire, likewise about the life and death of Colvin (killed in Homs, Syria by an Assad regime air-strike). Taro was killed during the Spanish Civil War in a tragic accident involving a reversing Republican tank.

Republican militiawoman training on the beach outside Barcelona by Gerda Taro (1936)

Taro was another stand-out squarist. She was partner of Magnum photojournalist Robert Capa. (Capa was introduced to the world by Picture Post in 1938, where my maternal grandfather worked. The Hungarian Jew, who famously lived out of a suitcase for most of his adult life, co-founded the Magnum photo agency with Henri Cartier-Bresson and others.) I saw Tara’s first ever US solo show at the International Center of Photography in New York in 2007. Capa picked up the habit from Taro and there are a number of square photographs attributed to Capa which are widely thought to actually be the work of Taro.

These days I find myself photographing square by default. I’ve enjoyed using Instagram for years as a platform for photography only (none of the Stories bollocks or video). Initially it was an excellent way to syndicate your photos across your social accounts (when it was linked to Flickr – the monopolists must have disconnected on account of Yahoo’s ownership of Flickr I guess). Square poses its own compositional challenges which by and large I enjoy rising to – there are not that many shots I take which can’t be accommodated in the stable, equal-sided space. It encourages the use of diagonals which can be dynamic. Here’s one of my favourite of my square compositions:

Statue of George Orwell outside the BBC (New Broadcasting House, Portland Place, London) March 2018

The square is stable enough to carry the two dark figures on the right side. Orwell’s statue is characteristically smoking, hence the appeal of the BBC smoker – both are fag in hand. Of course Orwell like Taro was a graduate of the Spanish Civil War but he made it home to the BBC and to die in the relatively civilised surroundings of UCH (University College Hospital, established by two of my distant ancestors on the Picture Post grandfather’s side, and where both my boys were born). Orwell’s house (at 1 South End Road) is along the same road in Hampstead/Parliament Hill where my dad grew up. He was a child of refugees from Nazi Germany.

If liberty means anything at all, it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear

To round off these square stories, Taro was given a funeral, attended by thousands, by the Communist Party of France. She was buried at Père Lachaise on 1st August 1937 (what would have been her 27th birthday) in a grave designed by Alberto Giacometti. On the tomb is written, in French and Catalan

So nobody will forget your unconditional struggle for a better world

Fast-forward to the summer of 2016 – an open-air display of Taro’s Spanish Civil War photos was included in the f/stop photography festival in Leipzig. Leipzig is where my dad was born in July 1937 in the shadow of the Nazi fascist regime, a swastika and eagle on his birth certificate. When f/stop ended, it was decided that the display would become permanent. This was partly financed through crowdfunding. On the night of 3rd/4th August 2016 (two days after Taro’s 106th birthday), the display was destroyed by being daubed with black tar-like paint. This dark act of destruction was widely suspected to be motivated by anti-semitism or anti-refugee politics. A further crowdfunding campaign more than raised the €4,000 required to restore the vandalised photos. The equal and opposite forces of creativity and destruction, light and dark, squared up to one another.

Be there and be square.