Human Flow

Tuesday’s 1.30 screening of Human Flow at The Courtyard, alas the last of three, was all but sold out. Remarkable, for a 2hr 20 min doc that can at times feel unrelenting. But entirely appropriate. We all know, or think we know, the story - but the scale of it - 65 million displaced people across the globe - alone justifies the length of the movie. Ai Wei Wei’s documentary, however, is far more than an exhausting catalogue of suffering. Duncan Wardlaw’s BFF notes and multiple laudatory reviews make that very clear. But what’s less noticed is the scale of the effort that both Ai Wei Wei and his crew - over 200 people worldwide, a dozen of them, including Ai himself, cinematographers, sixteen additional cinematographers, thirteen drones and one steadicam operator. An extraordinary but wholly justified camera department that produced some stunning results - including two aerial shots that alone are worth the price of admission.

Ai Wei Wei’s mobile phone footage features throughout, as does Ai Wei Wei, cutting hair, swapping passports, respecting, investigating, collaborating, witnessing. The editing of 1,000 hours of footage had at its helm Niels Pagh Andersen, best known for Joshua Oppenheimer’s Academy Award nominated documentaries about Indonesia, The Act of Killing and The Look Of Silence. Anyone who wants more should go to the comprehensive press kit.

The Courtyard projection team at work

Even if you stuck around for the credits, there’s plenty more there, but what it won’t have is a big shout out to Simon Nicholls and the projection crew at The Courtyard. Pin sharp pix, beautiful sound - they produce excellent results day in, day out. Not easy. Anyone spurred to action by Human Flow found People In Motion at the door with flyers about their work with refugees. In a country whose proud record includes the Kindertransport, they, and Ai Wei Wei’s film, are more than deserving of our support.

Stephen Hopkins

A Piece of History

As Borderlines Film Festival 2015 rolled into The Courtyard, the technical department decided to go for a bit of nostalgia and set up one of our Victoria 5 35mm film projectors for all to see in the foyer for the duration of the festival.

The Victoria 5 was first introduced to the world of film in 1975, built by Cinnemeccanica based in Milan. Developed as a low cost 35mm machine for use in multiplex cinemas, the Victoria 5 would become the firm’s most installed unit accounting for 95 percent of sales of 35mm equipment worldwide.

Here at The Courtyard we still have the capability to project 35mm film and a fully functional Victoria 5 projector is still used within our studio space, although with the coming of the digital age, the distribution of 35mm film prints is becoming more infrequent with most films arriving on a hard disk as a Digital Cinema Package.

But with some of Hollywood’s biggest studios still shooting on 35mm film every year, there will always be a place, certainly in my generation, for this wonderful medium to continue allowing films to be seen as the director intended when they shot it.

Below are a few photographs of the Victoria 5 in the foyer here at The Courtyard, taken by our resident Production Manager, Carl Hulme. More of Carl’s photography work can be found at carlhulmephotography.com.

Lens housing of the Victoria 5

L to R: Simon Nicholls, Chief Projectionist, Martyn Eatkins, Deputy Chief Projectionist

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Simon making adjustments to the lens housing

Martyn checking the film has been laced up correctly

 Dave Beever
Chief Technician
The Courtyard, Hereford

Much Birch - A fine place to see a movie

Browsing the Borderlines brochure with a pint at the Pilgrim Hotel

My wife helps to run the local Flicks in the Sticks and I help her to tell people about it. So this blog is partly an honest account of volunteering and partly a platform from which to encourage you to get along and see a movie at one of the many venues that will be hosting the 2015 Borderlines Film Festival!

The Girl With the Pearl Earring

We took our first trip to Borderlines when we had only been living in the county for a matter of weeks; the film was The Girl With the Pearl Earring at The Courtyard in March 2004. I remember it was an added screening to the initial run, as the film itself had been so successful that year. I remember this quite acutely, because The Courtyard had not quite figured out their overall scheduling process and for a large portion of the film we were treated to intermittent beats from the drum workshop next door. But the audience was not overly concerned, it was considered that we had squeezed into a space so that we could have a chance to catch the movie in all its understated glory - on the big screen.

The Festival and venue had made the film available to the community in the form in which the writer and director had created it – for the big screen. Drilling this down to another level, Flicks in the Sticks encourages communities in the region to make the most of our shared spaces; utilising pretty much any space from community hall to church, village hall to public house - to bring the movies to your doorstep. And of course as well as the shared spaces, you need the volunteers to run the individual Flicks in the Sticks.

As I type my good lady wife (Bryony) is out screening The Book Thief to an audience of twelve. Twelve people who will enjoy and dislike, twelve people who will engage and discuss the merits of a storyline, of a performance. What Much Birch Flicks does (in much the same way as all the Arts Alive initiatives) is give people living locally the opportunity to access exciting, moving and entertaining film performances in a local venue.

Since January 2006, Bryony and her fellow volunteer Carole (and many others) have been scheduling, organising and manning the Much Birch Village Hall for Flicks in the Sticks screenings, once a month, from September through May each year. From the two people who turned up for the screening of Coriolanus through the heady days of 100+ audiences for Ladies in Lavender, Calendar Girls and Mamma Mia to the decidedly feisty Saturday afternoons full of children and families who have used the hall for a whole host of other purposes such as christenings, yoga, birthdays, exercise classes, funerals, toddler groups and PTFA quiz nights.

For my part – the helping to let people know part - I have a cycle route of village notice boards that take me all around the South Herefordshire environs (well around a few villages anyway: St Weonards, Garway, Orcop, Wormelow, Much Birch, Much Dewchurch, Little Dewchurch and Kingsthorne). If I’m honest, it will only turn into a cycle route in the next few weeks when the Spring weather starts to hit – hopefully – otherwise it is really a drive by drop off when I get a chance.

Then there is the all-important monthly village magazine. Travel up and down the villages of Herefordshire and Shropshire each month and the village store or the village pub will have a village magazine and the village magazine will have news of the local Flicks in the Sticks screening.  For Much Birch village, the support of The Pilgrim Hotel is much welcomed, with regular Much Birch Flicks pre-screening offers. 

So here comes the encouraging to engage bit - get yourself along to any of the wonderful array of movies on offer around Herefordshire and Shropshire during the Festival. I myself am very much looking forward to The Possibilities Are Endless at The Courtyard on March 4. But if you do decide to come along and take in Before I Go To Sleep at Much Birch Village Hall, the good people at The Pilgrim (less than a half mile down the A49) have an early evening offer for you. From 5pm-7pm on the evening of Thursday 12 March – as a Much Birch Flicks / Borderlines attendee you can get yourself a pre-movie delight with a choice of a main course from the bar menu and a drink - for just £8.95

And of course the Flicks in the Sticks venues go on screening throughout the year, not just during the Festival. What the Festival does though, in particular with all of its accompanying promotion, is make a wider audience aware of all the cinematic opportunities that are open to the region. So during Borderlines, we will have regular Much Birch Flicks patrons who might come half a dozen times a year down to parents who might usually only take in a Saturday afternoon screening with the children, but what Borderlines brings each year, is the newcomers. What Borderlines does ultimately is open up more opportunities to discover cinema, to discover that all year round – From Wem Town Hall to St Mary’s Church, Ross-on-Wye there are movies rolling on a big screen pretty much every day of the week, all year round, right on your doorstep.

 Michael Connelly

@MuchBirchFlicks

The perspective of an outside helper

James Holden from Bedford, currently volunteering for the Reel Film Festival in Islington and spending a bit of time with his grandmother in Wellington, kindly offered his services to us just a few days before the start of Borderlines 2014. We were delighted to take him up and he spent about a week with us at The Courtyard on the Festival Desk. Here is how he described the experience.

Festival Desk from above

It was a real pleasure volunteering at the Borderlines festival. Herefordshire boasts fantastic countryside and the location of the festival offers opportunities to view award worthy international feature gems that may otherwise go unnoticed. I had attended the film festival 3 years ago with my Grandmother and was impressed with the festival's diverse programme and relaxed atmosphere. Buying the festival pass would make an educated film buff out of anyone who isn't already.  Naomi, the Festival Director was lovely to be around, as was Jo the festival's Marketing Manager. Alongside Joe, my fellow volunteer, I helped out at the front desk, promoting the festival and the funding campaign, setting up screenings and responding to enquiries. It was all rather relaxed and enjoyable. The festival's board members were a great bunch of film enthusiasts. Lunch at the Courtyard was catered for and of a high standard. The festival was very well attended and we received a lot of positive feedback. One of the perks was that I was allowed to watch the films at the festival for free, my personal highlight was the old French film Le Jour se Lève. I would certainly like to be involved again in the future and would recommend volunteering at the festival to anyone who shares a real passion for film.

Joe helping a customer  on the Festival Desk

 
Look forward to seeing you again James!

The Ultra-Viewers: "I don’t have expectations. I want to see something different."

It's well-known at Borderlines that there are festival-goers of prodigious appetite who reputedly and repeatedly watch over twenty films in the course of seventeen days. Many of them know each other and some of them like jazz too. I thought it might be instructive to seek them out. Blaise White lives very close to one of the smaller Flicks in the Sticks venues, Cawley Hall, Eye, near Leominster. He works for Concern Universal in Hereford.

O'Horten

Jo Comino: How many films, more or less, do you see in the course of one festival?

Blaise White: I would think up to twenty. I don’t think I saw so many this year but it wasn’t though lack of wanting to. So, yeah, I’d say up to a couple of dozen if the timings work out.

How do you plan for what you go and see?

We get the brochure and Maggie and I tend to go through our own brochure and we mark the ones we want to see.

Oh, so you each have your own copy?

Oh, yeah, yeah, we each have a personalised copy, we try and plan around are we going to go and see anything together. And if I can, I go on a weekend, on a Saturday say, and see four back-to-back at The Courtyard if they’re of interest. And then we’ve been down to Ross, that’s probably the furthest, or Ledbury, if there’s a particular film we want to see that’s not on anywhere else. We try and fit in as many around everything else that’s happening. And I always plan to take some leave but it never seems quite to work out. I’m probably going to work part-time next year so I should be able to see a few more. I like the idea of being able to go and see films at eleven o’clock in the morning, quite fun.

I go to the London Film Festival and watch films one after the other and sometimes you get two that are thrown together…

…so you get interesting contrasts. I remember going to see the one about the Mongolian horseman (The Eagle Hunter’s Son) on the plains, and then another one about some completely different location and you feel like you’ve travelled a huge distance in one day, being immersed in all these different environments.

The Eagle Hunter's Son

So what tends to appeal to you?

I have a slightly frivolous approach to everything: I’ll go for the less popular thing in the hope that it’s interesting. The mainstream films are always bland or tend that way because they’re appealing to a mass market so I like documentaries. You know the one about the nuclear store in Finland (Into Eternity)? It was a very interesting film but also a very interesting subject. I was really glad that I found out more about what’s actually going on. You think about the whole context. I’ve been involved with anti-nuclear campaigning, not lately, but since I was a student and the whole objection to nuclear power is that you can’t get rid of the waste and actually being reminded that somewhere in the remote wastes, deep underground there’s this kind of thing.

Into Eternity

Deadpan Scandinavian government officials are talking in a very matter-of-fact way, ‘Do we or don’t we put a warning sign outside? Because if we put a warning sign outside that might encourage people to be more curious whereas if we don’t put a warning sign outside, people might stumble on it by accident’. Then at the end they said something about how this was a huge project that amounted to a tiny fraction of waste in the world that needs to be stored or dealt with in some way. So that really crystallised the problem. I like it because it’s Finnish, it’s a different slant on that topic.

The other one was the Norwegian one about the train driver (O’Horten). I loved that because we’ve been on that train but it was just so wacky in an understated way! That really appealed to me. Things that are almost whimsical and not obvious and then having a foreign language film or a film with a foreign setting or foreign actors is interesting The Iranian one, A Separation, I really did want to see that because I’ve heard things about Iranian cinema but I don’t think I’ve ever seen an Iranian film before. You have a particular sense of Iran from the news, that there’s a theocracy and discontent, ordinary people not being happy living under this very oppressive system and you got much more of a real sense of what life is like; you wouldn’t otherwise know what the challenges are. Seeing a drama played out in a totally foreign environment, that’s interesting.

A Separation

 Is there anything you’ve seen that’s confounded your expectations, in either a good or a bad way?

That’s a good question because that’s the point: I don’t have expectations. I want to see something different.

So you let yourself go on a tide… bring it on!

Yes, bring it on! The Tibetan film about the dog (Old Dog) you could say in a way that’s such a dull film, nothing happens, it’s all very slow, but it’s fascinating. It’s not something I’d go to see everyday but I think, right, I’m going to book out some time because I want to take a chance and go and see something that will be different and it did have a powerful impact but in a very slow way.

Yes, it was very methodical, this happens and then this happens…

Old Dog

Sometimes I get a bit frustrated because, with a film like that, I don’t really understand the characters, what they’re feeling or what their motivations are. Ultimately when you knew the old man was being stubborn there’s a kind of shock suddenly when you realise he’s strangling the dog. You go out really satisfied because you’ve got to think about this, what’s really happening, summing up this moral dilemma because he doesn’t want the dog to be traded. You could argue that he’s right or wrong. It’s kind of meaty and thought-provoking, I suppose.

There were a lot of people who were totally alienated by the dog-killing. 

It was shocking but I could understand why, I could understand the intention of the film. I thought it was an intelligent way of constructing the film, the plot or the story had real power but in getting upset about it, they missed the point.

I’m trying to think if there’s anything where I’ve thought, ‘No, I don’t get the point of that at all...’

‘…that was a waste of time!’

To be honest, I went to see Bicycle Thieves and it’s bigged up as THE film, and it didn’t have the immediate impact that I expected it to. I didn’t think ‘I can see why people rave about this film or why it’s so influential.’ I didn’t kind of get it.

Bicycle Thieves

It could be because it was of its time?

Revolutionary or whatever.

Have you been coming to the festival right from the start or did you catch on to it?

I don’t know, when did it start? Was it the nineties?

No, 2003.

I think we would have been coming right from the start in that case. For me it’s a real thing to look forward to after the wintertime. You think, this is a time of year I really look forward to because I know I’m going to have an interesting experience.

You go sometimes with Maggie when your interests coincide. Do you prefer going with somebody else or on your own?

I’m quite easy. I’m happy going on my own and going with other people, you can compare notes afterwards and talk about the films you’ve seen. And they’ll say, ‘Did you see so-and-so?’ They might recommend something you hadn’t thought about and you’ll still have a chance to see it. I think she (Maggie) said to me once, ‘You go and see all these films at the film festival but then you hardly go to anything during the year.’

Do you really not go to see much else during the year?

Not a whole lot, no. We go to the Hall here or Yarpole, we’ve been to Bodenham, Stoke Prior, Leominster Playhouse, but I don’t think I’ve ever been to the Odeon in Hereford. I rarely go to The Courtyard where I know there are quite a few films on and it’s partly because they tend to be more mainstream films, the latest thing, and if it’s a good film I know it’ll be on at Flicks later. Like James Bond, we did see Skyfall eventually, but it was quite a few months after it had done the rounds. I’m not a film enthusiast in the sense that I’ll make time to see films. The thing that I like is being able to see lots of films together also the fact that you get a huge range of different things, the oddball films or the foreign films that you wouldn’t otherwise get the opportunity to see. And how many times do you ever get the chance to see a documentary?

Yes, that’s very true. On cinema release. I suppose in places like London documentary releases are becoming much more frequent but certainly round here…

Benda Bilili

We’ve been from work as well, because we’re dealing with international development and occasionally there are films like Benda Bilili, which was great. I thought I’m sure this is going to be a really fascinating film and it was and, there again, it was a documentary. And so I emailed round at work and said, ‘There’s this film, OK, we don’t work in the DRC but it’s about poor African communities and personal story and it’s got music.’ And I actually got people there, colleagues of mine who wouldn’t ever go to anything in the festival and I was really pleased that they came as a social event and got a lot out of it. I manage the finance team in the Hereford office and some of them are just accountants, they never travel to our programmes, a couple of them have got young children, so they don’t have first-hand experience of what it’s like working in Africa so I thought it’s a great opportunity for them to see that and it’s a great film, a great story.

I think we’ve got some African films in the forthcoming festival. One called Nairobi Half-Life. 

Did you watch films from an early age?

Yeah, I remember queuing round the block to see Walt Disney’s Fantasia. I grew up in Salisbury and the Odeon Cinema there is in this old Tudor house so I have this very atmospheric recollection that you go through this kind of timbered hall to get into the actual cinema and I vividly remember it was there for one night only.

Salisbury Odeon (from mawgrim.co.uk)

I’m just remembering now that there was a Salisbury Film Society and we were studying Macbeth. Polanski’s Macbeth was on at the Film Club so we went as a school thing to see it – I was about sixteen – and I remember that having a big impact. And then for some reason we went to Don’t Look Now at the film society when it first came out, early seventies, and I think that was the first X-rated film I had seen and that put me off. It was quite scary and atmospheric. So a few of us got into going to the film society films, arty ones as well. And, oh yes, there was a film called La Grand Bouffe about people eating themselves to death. The Tin Drum, The Enigma of Kasper Hauser, and a French film and there’s no dialogue in it and a guy who’s a painter, a dull industrial job, and he flips and turns into a caveman and his apartment into a cave and starts ululating and beating his chest.

Now I have some dim recollection of that. Was it with Michel Piccoli? (Themroc). 

Yes, there was this scene where they were having this demarcation dispute with two teams of painters are painting two sides of a set of railings and they get into a fight. So I suppose that’s where I got my taste for slightly offbeat foreign films when I was a teenager. Then as a university student seeing some films like that which I enjoyed.

Is there anything or any type of thing that you’d particularly like to see at the festival? We’ve shown quite a lot of classic films.

Casablanca at Shobdon Airfield

We went to see Casablanca in the hangar. That was a great idea, it made it an event. It’s one of those films you can watch anywhere and I love those 40s, Humphrey Bogart, film noir, Double Indemnity, type of films. Something Altman did, The Long Goodbye, in the seventies. I really like the breakfast films so that you can see four films in a day. I like classic films, foreign films, documentaries, art-house film, lesser-known films, low budget films, some animations.

I always think when the brochure comes out, 'Ooh, what’s going to be in there?' And I think last time I was disappointed; I was hoping there’d be some African films and there weren’t.

There was War Witch. Did you see that?

No I didn’t get to see that. There would probably be quite a few in the programme that I’d like to see but can’t get to. I suppose I’d encourage people at work to go and see the African films, make a social thing of it as well. I just enjoy the fact that I know there’s going to be a huge range of things to see, rather than particular things. Presumably you would always have a huge range of international films?

Oh yeah, I think that is something that is definitely part of the festival’s character.

I’m struggling to think, haven’t there been more defined strands or themes in previous years?

Yes, and we’re bringing that back.

If it’s a particular country or a particular subject, that’s quite nice. You think, well, I’ll go and see those three films because they all deal with related subjects.

Music films are another thing. One DVD I know is in there (cupboard) is Stop Making Sense, the Jonathan Demme concert film with Talking Heads. Absolutely brilliant as a concert film, I’ve never seen anything better. And you had one about Glenn Gould.

Genius Within: The Inner Life of Glenn Gould

I’ve just got more into listening to Glen Gould playing Bach piano music. It wasn’t a great film or anything, just a mundane documentary but I think he’s a really interesting character and it was fascinating to find out more about him, why he gave up playing and the strange relationship he had with his concert promoter’s wife. I knew he had issues about his mental health but that was very fortunate for me because I had a particular interest in him so I remember going to the afternoon show and there were about 12 people. And I thought, ‘Sod everybody else, it’s great that Borderlines puts these things on’.

I think it’s very important that it does.

Sometimes I like sitting in a cinema with just twelve people more than in a huge crowd of people. But then there’ve been some like The Lives of Others, a cinema full of people, and you feel the impact the film has on everybody coming out. I really remember that one very clearly because it had such an impact. That was a situation where you want to feel that everyone feels emotionally punched in the stomach by this piece of drama.

The Lives of Others

I love it because I’ve had all sorts of different experiences, from something fairly obscure to something big and amazing, from comedy to drama, and then factual interest. Just going and spending a day in the Courtyard, some days, a Saturday, I’ve been there and watched two or three films and hardly seen anyone I know and still you get the atmosphere of people coming and going, but generally I’ll bump into people and say, ‘Ooh what have you seen? What are you going to see?’

Introducing borderlines analog (an experiment)

Can a film festival be characterised as digital or analog?

Certainly in 2013 a significant number of Borderlines venues have switched to Digital Cinema Projection whereby the image you see on the big screen comes from electronic copy contained on a storage device, such as a high-capacity hard drive and server, rather than light projected through film. 35mm prints are becoming hard to get hold of and are beginning to be flagged by cinemas as a retro experience.

There are even two titles in the forthcoming programme that deal with this precise topic, The Last Projectionist, which focuses on the history of the Electric Cinema in Birmingham, and Side By Side, which uses A-lister Keanu Reeves to enter the bowels of Hollywood itself and talk to key figures in the industry about one of the most significant changes in cinema since the coming of sound.
 

Borderlines Film Festival however I would firmly describe as analog. Just look at the festival map.

 

It's all to do with place. You have to be there (any one of 39 distinctive venues) to take it in. It's a big network spread over three counties and approximately 2,000 square miles made up of small or medium-sized communities that come together for films or events during the one time of year in early spring when it doesn't feel as though the Marches are lagging behind the rest of the country in terms of cinema.

The Flicks in the Sticks team at Dorstone Village Hall

Tune For the Blood premiere, The Courtyard Hereford, 2012

Behind the Scenes at The Archers, Bromyard Conquest Theatre

Perversely then, as Marketing Manager for such a festival, I've just completed a rather different course run by the Independent Cinema Office called 'Creative Digital Marketing'. The first part took place in September and we, the participants, then had to go away, put something into practice and reconvene in February (yesterday) to discuss.

At the outset I had strong reservations about the relevance of anything digital to our audiences; Twitter and Facebook seem to operate on rather a peripheral level. But I was taken with something Claire Stewart, the Deputy Communications Manager at Watershed in Bristol, had set up in 2009: a noticeboard outside the cinema for people to post their often very strong reactions to Lars Von Trier's Antichrist. Here are a few of the comments.

At a meeting back in Hereford, Ryan, one of The Courtyard's marketing team, told me about the Analog Tweet project at the Walker Arts Center in Minnesota ('You Write It, We Tweet It') and I thought "Yes! I could adapt this for my 'Creative Digital Marketing' project!" (borrowing encouraged).

So, as a result, most of the 39 venues taking part in Borderlines 2013 will have a 'sophisticated' post-it note feedback facility available at screenings. It will be an immediate way to jot down and share your thoughts on what you've just seen and on the Festival generally. The voting system we have been running at The Courtyard for the past couple of years has proved very popular and the post-it system can be used to rate films according to the standards below too.

***** Excellent

**** Very Good

*** Good

** Average

* Poor

The way the post-its are displayed will differ from place to place according to the promoter's choice and preferences and a selection will be posted online on a dedicated 'borderlines analog' Twitter account (@BFFanalog).

We decided against being prescriptive about the number of characters on each comment; the size of the notes will provide some constraint. To get the ball rolling before the festival starts I've supplied SAE postcards to promoters, staff, board members and others at random and this is what the first tweets will consist of.

So 'borderlines analog' will be the offline voice of the festival. The hope is to convey some of the live buzz around Borderlines online as easily and immediately as possible. It might belly flop, it will probably be chaotic but it is an experiment. As one promoter replied when I asked if they would take part, "Yes, I'll play."

If you'd like to send a postcard through in the run-up to the festival, please email.

Where Angels Fear to Tread

Simon Nicholls, The Courtyard's Head Projectionist, cautions on demystifying the dream factory by entering the hot, sweaty din that is... the projection box. Read all about it in Notes from the Projection Room, his first post for The Courtyard's recently launched blog.

Our long overdue thanks to Simon for doing such a grand job during Borderlines. He's absolutely right when he says, "The projectionist’s job is one where the better you are at it the less you get noticed". We didn't notice a thing...