South West Screen awards Lottery funding to venues, festivals and archives

by MartinBooth on 09-Aug-11 11:48

South West Screen has awarded more than £130,000 Lottery funding to boost exhibition, moving image and screen heritage in the South West, under its Audience Development Fund.

The National Lottery funding has been awarded to nine regional organisations including venues, festivals and projects by South West Screen on behalf of the BFI. 

Sarah-Jane Meredith, Head of Creative and Audience Development at South West Screen, said: “South West Screen’s funding is supporting these unique projects to ensure that audiences throughout the region have access to a wide and diverse range of cinema and moving image content.

“There is some truly exciting work happening in this part of the country and I am delighted that we are able to offer support to help develop this work, and to connect the public in the South West to moving image culture.”

The nine projects to receive funding are:

Watershed Media Centre, Bristol: £75,000
Watershed is a key space for cultural exchange in Bristol which promotes engagement, enjoyment, diversity and participation in film, media arts and the creative economy, delivering a full-time independent cinema programme with associated festivals, events and talks. In 2010, Europa Cinemas named Watershed as Entrepreneur of the Year selected from among 1000 cinemas across 500 European cities. Watershed’s latest project, ‘Developing Diversity in Cinema and Developing Diverse Audiences’, will run until 31 March 2012, delivering a programme of screenings and events which presents the rich diversity of world cinema with an emphasis on East Asian and African and European films. It will provide a high profile platform for emerging UK creative talent and use moving image as a core element of creative practice, promoting creativity, innovation and participation. Events will include repertory seasons, retrospectives, archive screenings, partnership programming, film festivals and screenings local shorts before features.
www.watershed.co.uk

Encounters International Film Festival, Bristol: £15,000
This year’s festival will be held between 16-20 November 2011, showcasing new work from UK, European and international emerging talent. The Animated Encounters strand will host an Irish and Brazilian focus, a series of events challenging new technologies and new ideas, and an event discussing the building blocks of pre-school animation. Brief Encounters will host guest programmes from countries across the world, and will coordinate three short conferences, each with a specific day focus discussing emerging trends in the industry, such as developments in digital media, the role of film festivals, and the transition from short to feature filmmaking. The Shorts to Features strand will also return this year to celebrate those filmmakers who have made the progression from short to feature filmmaking. The festival will include gala events, competition short film programmes, high profile guests, talks and cinematography masterclasses, workshops, networking and training events, helping talent build relationships with industry professionals. Last year’s festival featured actor Andy Serkis, comedianTim Minchin, director Ken Wardrop and cinematographer Chris Ross.
www.encounters-festival.org.uk

From Page to Screen, Bridport Arts Centre, Dorset: £4,000
From Page to Screen is the UK's only annual film festival celebrating the art of adapting books into film, which last year saw participation from award-winning names like Kazuo Ishiguro, Bill Forsyth and Rowan Joffe, with Jonathan Coe as guest artistic director. The festival is run by Bridport Arts Centre, home to a variety of national and regional productions in theatre, music, dance and exhibitions, which attracts over 10,000 visitors each year. Next year’s festival will take place from 11-15 April 2012. Programming includes a focus on British films, writers and directors, high profile speakers, audience engagement and participation, and a film competition. Film notes for the festival are written by Bath Spa university students.
www.frompagetoscreen.org.uk

Bristol Silents Slapstick Festival 2012 and six-date South West tour: £6,000
Slapstick Festival has established an international reputation for silent film programming enhanced with musical accompaniments and speakers. Next year’s festival will run from 26-29 January 2012, with the subsequent six date tour to be completed by March. New guests include Mark Steele, David Jason, Griff Rhys Jones with regulars Graeme Gardner, Barry Cryer and Kevin Brownlow, and Shappi Khorsandi presenting the Chaplin programme. The gala event will take place on 27 January 2012, hosted by Griff Rhys Jones, and films will include rare French silent films and the forgotten films of comedian Charley Chase. There will also be a focus on female comedians, challenging the view that silent comedians were all men. The core festival is held in Bristol Old Vic, Colston Hall, Watershed and Arnolfini, while the tour will visit Strode, Frome, Wiveliscombe, Clevedon and Bath.
www.slapstick.org.uk

Screen Me Festival, Wiltshire: £6,000
The festival, a celebration of storytelling in film, will launch in October 2011, coinciding with Black History Month, and will run for six months, hoping to engage new audiences in Wiltshire. Working with a number of community groups to programme and present a range of new releases and thought-provoking older films, the festival will also join forces with the Wiltshire rural cinema initiative White Horse Pictures, taking film screenings out to local community venues. Seminars and workshops will also explore issues raised in the films, while Screen Me will also work with community groups to select films from around the world to present, telling stories from different cultures and unusual perspectives. The festival will culminate in February and March 2012 with a second run of films, entirely chosen by the ‘programming champions’. This mini-festival will include film reviews and interviews as well as trailers for forthcoming presentations and connections with other projects in Wiltshire that explore similar themes.

Purbeck Film Festival, Dorset: £3,000
This October sees the 15th anniversary of the Purbeck Film Festival, a festival which shows films in venues as varied as a sailing club, hotel, pubs, dress shop, garden centre and no less than 14 village halls. This is in addition to the traditional charms of the Rex in Wareham and the sophistications of the Lighthouse in Poole. Turning village halls into the ambience of a movie theatre is part of the magic and fun of the festival. This year's themes are the genius of Alfred Hitchcock and films which have either been nominated for or have won accolades at prestigious festivals such as Cannes. This month, the Purbeck Film Festival will be presenting an open-air film season at Corfe Castle, where children’s favourites The Princess Bride, Toy Story 3 and How to Train Your Dragon will all be screened.
www.purbeckfilm.com

Days of Clay, Azook CIC: £7,200
Azook is a not-for-profit community interest company dedicated to strengthening cultural confidence and cohesion across communities in Cornwall. The Days of Clay archive project runs until July 2012, screening a selection of 16mm silent films from the 1930s to the 1970s which document the working lives of clay workers and the social and cultural make-up of their communities.  Archive footage is from the Wheal Martyn Collection, which consists of 100 reels of archive footage from the china clay industry with the earliest footage dating from the 1930s. The project will digitise the material and repurpose it for a range of platforms.
www.azook.org.uk

Salisbury International Arts Festival, Wiltshire: £6,500
The Salisbury International Arts Festival screens a number of themed films with associated talks each year. The most recent festival in June this year featured a compelling selection of classic and recently released films programmed around the theme of China and dance.  Highlights included two UK premieres, a screening of a restored Chinese animation and talks with lead actors and restorers.  Next year’s festival theme, which will be played out through the film programme, is the cinema of Brazil.  In addition, the festival will use projection equipment purchased via the White Horse Pictures rural cinema scheme to screen new releases for rural and isolated communities, mainly focusing on garrisons, and at the Festival in 2012, to show recent releases.
www.salisburyfestival.co.uk

SWFTA Online: £10,000
The South West Film & Television Archive (SWFTA) is the South West’s regional film archive. It provides access to the public for community, social and educational activity through shows and projects and aims to preserve the collection which contains nearly 130,000 items. The SWFTA Online project began at the beginning of July and will run until the end of 2011, helping the archive open up content to new audiences and make information available in new ways online. The project will build on work currently being undertaken to develop a new catalogue database and search facility which is integrated with the UK Screen Heritage Union Search.
www.swfta.org.uk

Tagged:Audience Development Fund, National Lottery