No Wellies Needed

Norwich Film Festival. Odeon Cinema, Norwich. May 2014.

After our recent trip to Sundance London we had another chance to see films as part of a festival at the homegrown Norwich Film Festival.  Once more we decided to focus on the Short Film programme and managed to get to three of the four evening events.

First up we saw the BAFTA shorts - all of the films nominated at the main film award earlier in the year.  This screening comprised of seven films shown in two hours and surprisingly was my least favourite event.

The films were all technically good (and I'm told that two even were played as part of the 2013 Norwich Film Festival) but with the exception of Island Queen  none of them particularly wowed me. I think that after the variety of Sundance these all seemed too professional and polished and often too long.  I can't quite explain it in a way but I just preferred the shorter, rougher films.

Luckily the other two screenings were more like this, and while (obviously) I didn't like all of the 27 films shown they were much more to my taste comprising a mix of 1 minute films, student projects, animations and some professional films.

My overall favourite films were all animations: The Gravedigger's Tale , Une Aventure d'Escargots and Angels and Ghosts but the A Day in the Life of a Bathroom Mirror  was very funny as was Liars and several others were very moving.

I'm not a huge fan of films generally but 'shorts' are really growing on me and I'm looking forward to next year's festival already.

(ps - all of the links this time are 'worksafe')

Film Festival

Sundance London Film Festival. O2 at Greenwich. April 2014.

Mr Norfolkbookworm is much more of a film and cinema person than I am but as he so kindly accompanies me to so much theatre I am making an effort with films this year and to start this off we both went to the O2 in Greenwich recently to attend events at the Sundance London film festival.

We had tickets to both of the Shorts programmes and over the space of about 3 hours (plus time for a lovely sushi lunch) we saw 18 short films, some of which were really not to my taste and others that I want to watch time and time again.

Screening 1 started at 11.30 so this meant an early start from Norwich to get there in time but it was worth it as the first film screened was actually the Short Film Competition winner and called Russian Roulette. Bizarrely this was all about an Internet dating site used like Russian Roulette and the girl makes contact with a lonely astronaut maintaining a space telescope - the film can be seen here.

Other favourites from the morning session were Marilyn Myller and Cruising Electric (1980) which sadly isn't available on line.

In the afternoon another 9 films were screened and this session included the other two films I liked the best - Metube: August Sings Carmen "Habanera" and the incredibly moving I think this is the closest to how the footage looked. 

I really enjoyed the films but I'm not sure if it is because we were there in the day time and attending niche events but there didn't seem to be much of a festival atmosphere, in fact the "Festival Square" was all shut up when we arrived although by our late lunch there was live music as well as food/drink stalls to visit.

I still prefer theatre to film but I am now looking forward to the Norwich Film Festival in a few days - we have tickets to three short film events at that!

Please note that not all of the films I've linked to are 'worksafe' although none are probably higher than a '15' rating.