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.