Borderlines at Tarrington

The Lady Emily Hall, in Tarrington, has been involved with the Borderlines Festival for 5 years now – an association which grew out of our participation in the Flicks in the Sticks scheme. Originally, we used the Flicks technician and equipment service for the showings, but have now acquired all the necessary kit and (most of) the expertise to run them ourselves.

Preparation for the Festival, for us, starts before Christmas, when I am sent the catalogue of films to choose from. I then circulate this to about 30 of our regular Flicks attendees and ask them to pick their choices for our 2 showings. This usually results in a list of 20, which has to be re-circulated as a short-list ! Having picked 3-4, we submit these back to Ian Kerry, with dates, and he sorts out clashes between nearby venues and allocates us 2 films.

We are probably not bold enough, from an artistic perspective, when choosing films, because we are looking to get as large an audience as possible to maximise revenue for the Hall – the increased publicity from the Festival is very effective in doing this. However, the Festival films are usually very popular and the audience comes from all over Herefordshire.

In Glorious Technicolor event with Francine Stock Lady Emily Hall, Tarrington, Borderlines 2012

The Borderlines films nearly always provide us with the biggest audiences of the year, sometimes spectacularly so ! A couple of years ago, we showed Resistance (filmed in Herefordshire) and after having a lot of enquiries in the preceding week, decided to run 2 showings in the evening, without our usual mid-film break – so we started at 7pm with 110 in the audience, then ran it again at 9:30pm with another 45 as audience – our average Flicks audience is 35.

Interval tea break at Lady Emily Hall

We always provide refreshments at the halfway point in the film, with wine for sale as well, and often have this available before the films – in fact, my primary concern before the night is to judge the audience numbers correctly so I can provide enough wine ! I had to go home for more, while Grand Budapest Hotel was showing, as we had run out before the film.

The half-time break is sometimes difficult to finish, as everyone becomes engrossed in conversation – turning the lights off normally works ! It’s also useful for feedback, though, if the heating or sound level/ quality aren’t right – I’ve added sub-titles at this point several times.

It’s all a team effort, as it wouldn’t work in our Hall without volunteers who set out the chairs; prepare and serve refreshments; print the posters; distribute posters; and finally clear-up afterwards.

It also wouldn’t work, without the team at Arts Alive in the background, preparing the programme, all the associated publicity material and everything else required.

John Tallis
Flicks in the Sticks Promoter, (projectionist, wine waiter …)
Lady Emily Hall, Tarrington

Films screening at Lady Emily Hall, Tarrington at Borderlines 2015

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

Tune For the Blood director previews Bullhead

When I sat down to watch Bullhead, I was expecting something different. I thought it was going to be a crime thriller about hormone use in cattle in Flanders, a tale of bad men contaminating meat with hormones - quite topical given the recent horsemeat scandals. I thought it might be a film that would play well at a rural film festival. However, I don’t think the local farming community will be flocking to see this one.

Yes, it has a rural setting – it takes place in Belgium where the local Flemish farming community is heavily involved in building up their Belgian Blue cattle with illegal drugs, while the ‘hormone mafia’ carve out their power bases. And one strand of the film involves an undercover police investigation of the Flemish hormone mafia, but by far the most interesting and powerful story is the heartbreaking unravelling of Jacky, a beef farmer - played by Rust and Bone's Matthias Schoenaerts - who cannot escape the man he has become. Like the animals he tends, he injects himself with hormones. The emotional power of the film pulses along a current that runs between the adult Jacky and the child he was when subjected to a random act of violence, which is depicted in a scene of gut churning brutishness.

The brilliance of Bullhead is in the way that almost every frame of the film is tense with the pumped up muscularity of Jacky’s adult being. The flat grey fields, muddy tracks, and lowering skies are troubled, brooding and wary. Even the tonal range of the image is held in check, kept tight, so that when I remember the film, I almost remember it in black and white. The sound track is spare, attenuated.

In one scene, where Jacky hastily snatches a fancy, boxed eau de cologne to buy at the end of an exchange at a cosmetics counter, it stands out as moment of achingly awkward tenderness in the hulking rawness of the film, and that tenderness is felt only once again, when Jacky checks on a new born calf that has been lowered into a wheelbarrow. They are the moments that remind us, along with the haunting final images of the 10 year old boy he was, that deep within the sinews that bind his brutish, hormone built world together, is a vulnerable, fragile being, whose loss is what makes this such a painful but powerful film.

Bullhead is not an easy film to watch, and the police story and the Jacky story don’t quite mesh together, but this bruising film is really worth seeing. Just don’t expect Countryfile.

Over the Hill?

Actress Doreen Mantle (One Foot in the Grave) being interviewed just before the launch of The Rural Media Company's campaign to raise awareness about the challenges of growing older in the countryside.

Guardian piece at http://t.co/mxtObMYj

What alchoholics refer to as 'A moment of clarity'

Hi everyone. It's Kaz again.

As promised, here is the Hereford College of Art YouTube page. Have fun and please comment on the videos. My page is posted beneath.

http://www.youtube.com/user/herefordartcollege

http://www.youtube.com/user/accionmutante2

Before I go on, I would like to share with you a realisation I had upon sitting down in the Studio theater of The Courtyard today. And that realisation, silly as it may seem, was that Borderlines Film Festival is, and always will be, an independent film festival...

Maybe this isn't the most difficult of things to realise, but I really had not thought of it that way. I always just thought of it as a small festival, that only ever showed 2 or 3 films I'd heard of. I only ever go to one of its venues, and the tag line for the festival is 'The UK's largest rural film festival,' which hardly conjures images of grandeur. But the festival is shown over 28 cinemas. I'd never even thought of that before.

When I turned up to see The Wrestler yesterday, I was not surprised to see that the theater was half empty. I mean, we're in Hereford. When I went to see The Dark Knight there were only 15 people in the cinema and that was one of the biggest films of 2008. But today it struck me. I walked in to the theater expecting an even quieter experience as I watched the charming and witty film Lemon Tree. Unsurprisingly when I walked in, I was confronted with no mere than a handful of patrons, sat quietly waiting for the film to start. I was shocked enough when a couple seated themselves next to me, but safe in the knowledge I would be able to move to a more open space in the auditorium (I like to use both arm rests), I sat patiently waiting for the lights to go down so that I could embrace another seat without fear of being asked to move. No luck. Within 3 minutes the theater was full. Not one seat was left unoccupied and shear human warmth began to almost illuminate the room. It was at this exact moment I had my moment of clarity. This was an independent film, and this is what people wanted to see. And it made me proud to be there. People had filled a room, not because of a shiny poster, or a big Hollywood actor, or even a 1080i trailer on iTunes (standard definition only I'm sad to say). But they had come here to see a Palestinian independent film because it's not the usual Hollywood throw away that you can see anywhere. The had come to see it because without the Borderlines Film Festival, they would probably never have had the chance. And being an independent film maker myself, I'm proud to know that there is such a festival in my local area, and I'm proud to have had the chance to show my work there.

Aaaaanyway. I feel like I've been talking for far to long. And I haven't even talked about the film I went to see. Which was brilliant by the way. And very, very funny. It's not the most wide spread entertainment in the world but I happen to be a fan of what little Palestinian cinema I have seen and I am also an advocate of Palestinian stand up comedy. So to me it made a perfect coupling. And the rest of the audience seemed to enjoy it as well.

The director of the film, Eran Riklis, said, when asked if the film was political, that he 'didn't believe in the term and found it out dated.' and I am inclined to disagree. Yes, everything has a political opinion inside it somewhere but some more than others. I think what he has done with Lemon Tree, and what Borderlines has done by bringing it to Hereford has done more to raise an interest in the Palestine/Israel conflict than most news reports will, because it gives the audience people with stories, not just politics and death tolls, and that is what makes people care.

Kaz

p.s From the other side of the fence, as it were, (you'll get the joke if you've seen the film, or if you like pseudo-satirical puns about political relations in the middle east) this is an interesting film from student film makers in Israel, called Smile.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dMpvTuBPWt4

Thanks again for reading, and keep watching films at the festival.