07-07-08 (SLOVAKIA)
I left my best pants in a cupboard in Slovakia. Shit. Located in the idyllic northern Slovak town of Trencianske Teplice, Artfilm International Film Festival is a ninety minute drive from Bratislava airport and the moment I got to my hotel I was urged to dump my bags in my room and join everyone for a medieval banquet at a beautiful big castle, including lots of food and drink. This was swiftly followed with games and performances by folk in medieval costume, and finally a night tour of the castle itself, complete with spectres jumping out of dark corners. A pretty unexpected first evening, and then I found the VIP bar with unlimited free quantities of any drink (every night). When I asked for a glass of champagne they said I could only have a bottle! Dangerous, but a great way to meet people, which can get confusing when there are four Janas, three Zuzanas, and as much Borovicka as you dare to drink. Soft screened well and I wished I could have stayed longer than the meagre four days I had. It was a lovely, relaxed time and I didn't even get to use the spa or swimming pool.
Coming home was the usual shit. Groups of gobby English lads (again with popped collars on their polo shirts) who invaded Bratislava for the cheap beer and couldn't keep themselves quiet on the plane, jeering at the flight attendants (one of them hollered "Oh yeah, buckle me up baby!" from the back while the seatbelt procedure was being demonstrated, I kid you not). It's always so toe-curlingly embarrassing. Do these people have no cringe bone?
Three festivals and a music video in four weeks isn't bad going. If you have a few minutes to kill while the kettle is boiling or your cornflakes are sinking, you can go here for an image gallery.
01-07-08 (MUSIC VIDEO / NEW MAGAZINE ARTICLE / MAX RICHTER)
Finished cutting the music video for Swimming's ace new single 'Panthalassa'. Hats off to everyone who turned up and trooped underground to Nottingham's cosy Baselab studio to jump about and play merry hell. My head wept like a loaded sponge and I was only filming.
Go here for an article in the impressive new 4Talent magazine. The scan is 1mb for legible text so how quickly it appears will depend on the speed of your connection. I popped into Borders bookstore on Oxford Street to see if Filmwaves magazine was selling like nobody's business but there were lots of them on the shelf. Hmm. Maybe they just, er, restocked after popular demand.
I finally got to see Max Richter perform live (the composer whose music I used for A Storm and Some Snow), double-billed with Johan Johansson, in a church. Very satisfying it was too. You would have to be missing a spine not to be stirred by the time it was all over. As both composers neatly dovetail classical with electronic elements, I wasn't quite sure which way the vibe would swing and wondered if everyone would be exteremely serious and wearing suits. Then they handed out fizzy sweets at the door and I noticed that Max was wearing jeans and trainers. Brilliant.
17-06-08 (PORTUGAL)
Having just been to Festroia Film Festival in Portugal to present Soft in the Prix UIP section, I feel obliged to rant about flying for a bit. Carbon footprints aside, flying is shit. We all know how hideous cheap airlines can be, airlines such as Ryanair, the flying equivalent of catching the local bus that only costs one pence until you then have to cough up £24.99 tax and a further £24.99 tax tax. They never hesitate to proudly boast to their passengers if they land at their destination ahead of schedule but completely fail to even acknowledge, let alone offer an explanation, if they are late. And let's not mention the shrill commercials for energy drinks and scratchcards that bleat your ears off from the moment you set foot on the plane. I could write an essay on the wrongs of this stupid little company but it's well documented already and there's even a book devoted to it. So...
... this time I flew with BMI and, with my outbound flight being delayed by two hours, things didn't get off to a promising start. Then I had the serious misfortune of being seated directly in front of a gaggle of let's-all-get-pissed-as-fast-as-we-can blokes. You know the type, collar-popped polo shirts tucked into their jeans, shit trainers, identical haircuts, almost certainly bullied at school and making up for it ever since by seeing who can sink the most beer. The main problem is that these money-sucking airlines never refuse alcohol to anyone, no matter how shitfaced and annoying they might get.
So, after the whole plane got to hear about the menchildren's drinking itinerary for the evening, and a mildly bumpy landing in Lisbon saw snakebite being splashed down the back of my neck, I escaped the plane and was shot of them at last. Time to start to calming down and wondering why I still haven't moved to Germany. The festival driver then tells me that, as the flight was so delayed and it was late in the evening, I wasn't likely to find much to eat in our destination town of Setúbal unless I was prepared to eat McDonalds. I was starving, so against my better judgement I had one of their meal things. My body refused to digest it and after walking about with a brick in my stomach for a couple of hours I vowed never to eat a McDonalds again. How the hell people eat it on a regular basis I'll never know.
After these teething troubles things calmed down and the festival had a lovely, laid back vibe. Within no time I found a cold beer and a bean bag. The following day the sun was scorching and I went to the beach, ate actual food and met nice people. Over the whole weekend I only actually got to watch one film, a rather forgettable Polish feature, but I bumped into the actor Nickolas Grace, who played the Sheriff of Nottingham in the 1984 television series Robin of Sherwood.
When the time came to fly back to the UK I was overjoyed to discover that my return flight was delayed by an hour and would land too late to catch a train back to Nottingham. Deep breaths. By this point I hated BMI so much that everything they did would infuriate me, like announcing before we took off that the plane had "two free toilets" as if such facilities were some kind of luxury extra that we should be paying a surcharge for, or by stating that their selection of drinks and snacks were available "at competitive prices". Now, I can't say that paying almost a pound for a can of coke the size of a baby's foot is value for money, but "competitive"? At 35,000 feet in the air, who are they competing with exactly?!? I guess they must mean Ryanair.
Go here for a teeny, tiny, almost pointless gallery of images from the trip.
12-06-08 (HAMBURG)
Just returned from the annual trip to Hamburg International Short Film Festival, which was great, of course. This year I was crippled by hay fever for most of each day, which was something of a nightmare, but it was great to see familiar faces again. Dying Backwards screened in competition and Soft was screened on the side of a building to an audience of approximately one thousand people for the excellent Wall is a Screen event. I will post a picture as soon as I have one.
27-05-08 (FUR TV / SPRING CLEANING)
I just witnessed what became of my second Fur TV episode since my departure. To say it that it was quite distressing would be putting things mildly.
I'm cleaning and organising my house in an effort to cleanse my soul. I've been doing it slowly for over a week now and it's working a treat. Throwing stuff out is fantastic catharsis and finding a home for things that have been laying around for over a year brings major satisfaction. I was just telling my bafta-bothering friend Dan Mulloy about a battle I had last night with a new shelf, feeling all victorious and triumphant, and he said that if I was having a battle with a shelf then the shelf has won already. Damn.
10-05-08 (FUR TV)
There's a clip of my first episode for Fur TV online here (episode two).
Nothing else to report yet as i've either been doing completion on the feature or thinking about cleaning my house, putting shelves up everywhere, getting some exercise, or sleeping. So far I have only managed the latter. Oh and I just mowed my lawns, so that's a bit of exercise, isn't it.
22-04-08 (HAHA)
Well I never, look who made the cover of Filmwaves magazine...
