It seems like only a couple of days ago that this year’s Raindance Festival closed but already the team has opened submissions for next year’s festival. This year over 138 short films were featured and films from over 35 countries featured. In my coverage over the past couple of years I’ve tended to focus on the feature films but I’ve been contacted by some short film-makers and have been reassessing my thoughts on short films…
Welcome to the Rileys
17 November 2011 by 1 Comment
One of the best websites I’ve discovered since setting up LouiseReviews is Launching Films, home of the Film Distributors’ Association. It has all sorts of interesting information such as the current box-office Top 15 and the UK film release schedule….
Four
9 November 2011 by Leave a Comment
Since attending the Raindance Film Festival I’ve started to become a lot more interested in independent, low-budget British film-making. Much as I love the Colin Firth/Hugh Grant movies that seem to make up much of the successful UK output I’m looking forward to getting to know more of the kind of smaller British output …
The Ballad of Des and Mo
11 October 2011 by Leave a Comment
One of the great things about attending Raindance this year has been the opportunity to interact with a number of film-makers. Interviews and Q&A sessions with directors offer new perspectives on the films and help to create a deeper understanding of the effort that went into making the movies…
Victims
8 October 2011 by Leave a Comment
Imagine that all the people who believe everything they read in the Daily Mail got together and decided to sort out the injustices they see all around them. The country would descend into chaos and people would face punishment dished out by the mob rather than the courts …
Mesocafe
6 October 2011 by Leave a Comment
The war in Iraq and the search for Weapons of Mass Destruction (WMD) have been a source of inspiration for a number of films including In The Valley of Elah, The Hurt Locker and the hugely disappointing Green Zone. All of these come from a Western (American) perspective…
Amnesty (Amnistia)
5 October 2011 by 2 Comments
As I expected, my time at the Raindance Film Festival is exposing me to films I would never normally choose to go and see. Not because they aren’t worth seeing but simply because they would never normally have come onto my radar, not being amongst the blockbusters showing at the local multiplex…
Hollow
5 October 2011 by Leave a Comment
In the past couple of years there has been an explosion in the number of “found footage” films. Mostly these are films which look like they have been recorded on a camcorder and discarded after a horrific event of some description…
Black Pond
3 October 2011 by Leave a Comment
One of the strands at this year’s Raindance Festival is Best of British and I predicted a few weeks ago after the launch that Black Pond would be one of the big talking points of the Festival. I may well still be right, but not for the reasons I thought…
Skinning (Šišanje)
30 September 2011 by Leave a Comment
Last year at Raindance the short Balkan film strand drew both praise and criticism, particularly for the inclusion of A Serbian Film which horrified many viewers with its graphic scenes and distasteful plot. The controversy hasn’t put the Festival off the promotion of Balkan cinema…