Portobello Film Festival Awards

Electric Cinema
London
21 August 2007

Back in Blighty, I just caught the end of the festival, with its awards ceremony in the oh-so-plush Electric Cinema on Portobello Road.

As it started late, I had to leave early and so missed the presentations but prior to that, the shortlist was screened.

Top of the list was the very clever and well-made The Last thing To Go Through A Fly's Mind (dir Steve Webb), which won for best film. This was a surrealist comedy touching on reincarnation and karma. No, really. I could see the payoff coming a mile away, unlike the fly. Bah-dum-sum.

Green Pages won for best director (Sasha C Danjanovski). I had seen this film and found it incredibly tedious on preview but it played better in a quiet cinema. I still think it's overlong, but I can see why it won this award: directing a one-shot film dependent entirely on the actors' performances (the screenplay is directory entries) is certainly a big ask. Not my cup of tea, though.

Winner for best foreign film was The Dreams Of Lost Time (dir Faysal Saysal), which I found incomprehensible. It seemed to be a meditation on death and motherhood set in Iran, but the English subtitles were comically bad and obviously not accurate. A pity as it was beautifully shot.

Je Suis Jean, the winner for best art film, is a Marmite film (dir Christine Pinheiro/Andre Scucat), a tres arte black and white surrealist (that word again) take on Monsieur Cocteau. Lovely images. The point?

Salt And Vinegar (dir Mark Jackson), which I saw at Raindance last year, won for best animation. A punk rock musical about chips and rebellion.

Kourtrajme won for best cinematography, an interesting choice as this group has filmed the Paris riots and the footage shown, all hand-held camcorder shots of milling men throwing stones at the police, was set to Queen's "Don't Stop Me Now" ("I'm having such a good time") in what I imagine was meant to be a light-hearted two fingers up to the authorities. However, in my eyes, all it did was trivialise a highly charged and serious issue, remove from it any context and present it as a macho past-time. The message left: rioting is fun. A bit more thought could have gone into that, methinks.

Portobello Film Festival Launch Party

Cobden Club, London
18 July 2007

Although the PFF held a launch some months ago, this was the one to launch this year's programme, which makes more sense. Held again at the Cobden Club, the programme featured a night's worth of short films, accompanied by loud chatter and free beers (the last two possibly linked).

Although I didn't stay for the full duration, being an eastie and thus at the mercy of London Transport, I saw a good range of work which will be presented at the festival from 1 to 22 August (http://www.portobellofilmfestival.com/).

Among the best were some experimental docs. J Is for Julie made intriguing use of home movies and snaps to trace the life of filmmaker Carol Burns's mother from her youth as a Jew in Hitler's Europe to her death as an emigre in London. The pictures were almost entirely stills but still very dynamic and affecting. It helped that the subject was so intriguing: Julie described herself as a "Jewish Christian Marxist" and found it difficult to finid a place for herself. Not surprising.

Colourful EU was Peter Vadocz's witty depiction of the flags of the EU countries found in everyday objects such as office supplies. At two minutes it flew by.

Baron Samedi, by Dan MacMillan started off brilliantly as it set up a haunting backdrop to explore the legend of blues player Robert Johnson. Then it turned into a Marilyn Manson video and I lost interest.

As far as fiction films went, they were more hit and miss. Green Pages, an alleged comedy by Sasha C. Danjanovski, was lost in the chatty confines of the Cobden and went on way too long anyway.

Film Eight, by Dan Gitsham, was well made and quite amusing but was listed as Horror. Surely some mistake?

Slap, a drama by Uriel Emil about domestic violence, I found a bit disturbing because it seemed to end on an inappropriate comic note. A matter of interpretation perhaps.

The festival has a real sense of place, dwelling on the psychogeography of the area and making use of historic venues. Among the offerings are Julien Temple's Joe Strummer doc, The Future Is Unwritten, and a photo exhibit from The Roughler Gallery Archive.

Portobello Film Festival Launch

Cobden Club
London

Oh, dear. I had been looking forward to this evening to launch this year's festival even if it meant a trek to the foreign climes of West London. Nice canal and all but... The Cobden Club is an impressive venue, an old brick working men's club with an unexpectedly posh interior. However... Whose idea was it to site the bar and the screening room in the same space? Within a half hour the noise level from those chatting at the bar was enough to impede and eventually overwhelm the film soundtracks, making it impossible to enjoy the films.

I stayed for half of the four-hour programme of short films and then gave up, so sorry to those I didn't see but take it up with the management.

Standout film of the first two hours was Get Your Tags Out, dir Ben Hilton, which made me laugh out loud. The premise is clever: women treating shopping the way men treat football. So, we had two groups of women staking out their turf and wearing their "colours" and taunting each other in alleyways and shopping malls.

I was intrigued by Viva Liberty! (dir Dishad Husain) which started off brilliantly, as nerdy, bespectacled "Woody Ali" (brilliant) finds himself in the clutches of the US authorities after a misunderstanding on an airplane. As a piece of satire, the premise is excellent, but it didn't sustain the initial burst. This film definitely suffered from the background noise, as it was very wordy. Still, I felt it dragged.

The Wheelhouse (dir Sean Garland) was badly hampered by technical problems with the DVD, so I can't really comment on it.

The Tail (dir Andy Shelley) was another clever film satire on discrimination, setting up a small 1950s-type town in which everyone has a tail. What happens when one man loses his?

Dottie: The Little Girl with the Big Voice (dir Dawn Westlake) took a similar theme of not belonging but in animation, and was also quite funny. For some reason it had subtitles, as well, which proved helpful as it screened during a noisy period.

Thoroughly Modern Mili, by the same director, was less successful, a live action satire on US militarism that went on too long and didn't sustain its premise of a French woman working for the US government. This film was substituted for the opener, Teer, which had technical problems and so didn't screen.

Looking forward to the fest but, strangely, no information was given out about it on the night. Most odd.