Thursday 28 January 2010

First post

Testing. Ready to Rock n'Roll!

Download Borderlines Film Festival calendar for iCal

In order to help plan your viewing we've put the whole Borderlines programme into an iCal file that Mac users can download from our website. Scroll down below the sign-up form in the sidebar and you'll find the link.

The download is also available on the Programme page below the Events list.

PC users should also be able to use this facility in Windows Outlook. After download, choose the File>Import command (rather than Open) in Outlook, use the Wizard and when prompted for file type select .ics or .vcs.

Thursday 21 January 2010

Borderlines Film Festival website is now live!

Full programme details and online booking (for The Courtyard Hereford tickets only) now operational.

The Courtyard Box Office is now open for bookings. Check out their Festival Ticket offer, a discount of £1 per ticket when you book for 5 or more events in one transaction. Please note that the offer doesn't apply to online ticket purchases; you'll need to call the Box Office on 01432 340555 or go along in person.

Daytime screenings before 3pm are also discounted at £3 and these are excluded from the above offer. Friends of The Courtyard are entitled to a 10% discount.


Our latest venue, Wem Town Hall in North Shropshire, is also offering a special deal, all 4 films in their programme for £12 (£6 saving!) when bought at the same time. They're showing silent Soviet masterpiece Man with a Movie Camera and Buster Keaton's Neighbors with piano accompaniment by Paul Shallcross, the new biopic about John Lennon's formative years, Nowhere Boy, and two fabulous but very different music-themed films The Wind Journeys and Youssou N'Dour: I Bring What I Love. Call 01939 237075 to book.

Monday 18 January 2010

Welcome wins 4th award!

Welcome, the powerful story of a young Kurdish refugee trapped in Calais, took the Lumiere Award (the French equivalent of the BAFTAs) for Best Film on Friday evening. Meanwhile director Jacques Audiard took Best Director for A Prophet, the absorbing prison thriller that has wowed audiences internationally.


Welcome screens on the opening night of Borderlines 2010 at The Courtyard and A Prophet plays at the festival in early March.

Spread the word

There's a wonderful moment in Up in the Air when whizz-kid Natalie coins the term GLOCAL to illustrate to a roomful of rather more grounded (and slightly bemused) colleagues how the world is shrinking. Global is local and there's no longer any reason to travel when firing people can be done virtually, online.

On the eve of the first of the big Film Award ceremonies of 2010, the Golden Globes - in which Up in the the Air is nominated in several categories - it appears, according to an article in Variety,  that this is the first year in which viral marketing will play a significant role in bringing a film to public attention and raising its award profile.

Several of the films playing at Borderlines 2010 get a mention: Moon, We Live in Public (a documentary whose very subject  is social media) for the Twitter campaigns that have made up for meagre publicity budgets.

Celebrating the best way I know how on TwitpicThen there's Up in the Air itself whose director, Jason Reitman has been tweeting as he travels around Europe, then across the US, promoting the film at festivals, movie theaters, on college campuses in a strange parody of the main character, Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) in his movie. Often his tweets are no  more that airport destinations (SFO-LAX), many are pictorial featuring the protein-heavy food he consumes with relish and appreciation, airport lounges, radio, stations, fast food outlets and a bizarre Thanksgiving incident in which he's relegated to Economy Class because the best seats on the plane have been reserved for a consignment of presidentially-pardoned turkeys that are travelling to Disneyland.
Not kidding. They're flying them to Disneyland. Everyone's ge... on Twitpic
Then there's the recurring appearance of the pie chart on which Reitman records the number of times he's asked a certain Question about the movie. Until the questions start to feature the pie chart itself.

The level of detail is involuntarily engrossing, promoting a degree of intimacy that doesn't actually exist. Except on that glocal level.

For more on a related issues, join us on Wednesday 3 March for Here Comes Everyone:) Citizen Journalism in the Digital Age where we explore and debate the effect new and cheap technological advances in media have had on the way we communicate and the frequency with which we exchange information.

POSTSCRIPT: Jason Reitman and Sheldon Turner won the Golden Globe for Best Screenplay for Up in the Air
That was unexpected... on Twitpic