The Norwich Film Festival
HAS PASSED FOR ANOTHER YEAR!
But submissions for 2014 are ALREADY OPEN!
Recap: NFF Shorts (Parts 1&2)
The last two nights (3rd and 4th May) have seen us head back to Cinema City to screen thirty six amazing short films to an almost sell out crowd.
On Friday we kicked off with the winner of our One Minute Movie competition, Hamburgz by Jordan Schmelzer, which was followed up by the winner of this year’s Best Short Film award, 82 by Calum Macdiarmid. In fact, by sheer coincidence, all this year’s winning films were screened on Friday night, as after the interval we also had the pleasure of watching the Best Student Film (Callum, by Michael van der Put) and the Best Animated Film (I Am Tom Moody, by Ainslie Henderson). There was a lot of talk of those films at the end of the night, but other audience favourites on Friday included David’s Fine, Island Queen, and Love Nest which all seemed to raise the loudest applause and laughs of the night.
Moving on to Saturday and we were joined by our patron, Bernard Hill, who dropped by to watch more films with us for the closing night. While no winning films were screened, audiences were treated to plenty of other fantastic nominated films, including Man In Fear, Momentum and Aeolian. Audiences also really seemed to love Rich Keeble’s A Slightly Exaggerated Reenactment… (which is a relief, since he was sitting in the crowd with us!), as well as Australian comedy Cockatoo. The closing film was a heartwarming tale of young love from Colombia called El Invento (The Invention) which seemed to bring about a collective “aww” from audiences when it finished. A great way to end the evening and see off the festival for another year!
Recap: BAFTA Shorts
Last night (28th April) saw an almost sell-out crowd at Cinema Cinema as we kicked off the third Norwich Film Festival. It was really amazing to see so many people there and we are ever so grateful to everyone that turned up.
We started the show with two films from one of our partners, the Bath Film Festival. The first film was Pussy Cat by Simon Wharf, voted the winner of the IMDb Script to Screen Award at this year’s festival. Of 84 scripts sent in, Simon’s was deemed the best, so he was given £5000 last summer to go out and make his darkly comic film about a man, his wife, and her cat. This was well received by the NFF audience with lots of laughs throughout. We’d also like to congratulate Simon for recently winning the Royal Television Society Short Film Award for this film.
Next up was the beautiful animated film Head Over Heels by Timothy Reckhart. This film about a married couple who are separated by unconventional means was voted ahead of 200 others to win the IMDb New Filmmaker Award this year. It was also nominated for the Best Animated Short Oscar at this year’s Academy Awards. Another favourite for the NFF audience.
Finally, we finished the evening with seven short films that were all nominated for this year’s BAFTA’s. The films were Here To Fall, The Curse, Tumult, I’m Fine Thanks, The Making of Longbird, Good Night and Swimmer. An eclectic mix of intense drama, dark comedy and artistic conceptualism, these films offered a bit of everything to all. It was tough to pick a favourite judging by the audience reactions, but after speaking to our lovely guests after the event, it seems it would be a very close call between the very original Tumult, which mixes dark humour with Tarantino-esque violence (all the while maintaining beautiful cinematography in the Scottish Highlands), and The Making of Longbird, a film which combines live action and animation to create a heartfelt and entertaining documentary about a filmmaker and his character.
We’re very much looking forward to next week’s screenings now, and we hope to see you all on Friday and Saturday! Thank you once again if you came last night, we love you for it.
For more information, check out our events page now!