London Underground Film Festival
Sunday 9th December
12:00 Celluloid Wonders and Haunted Memories: The Films of Tony Lawrence
Advanced, discounted tickets are available for £3.50 + booking fee at: www.wegottickets.com or for £5 at the door.
Our Sunday afternoon programme, curated by Jack Sargeant, begins with a selection of films by Tony Lawrence.
Australian filmmaker Tony Lawrence uses old celluloid and found home movie footage to create a cinema of dreams, hallucinations and visions. Often crafted from found footage that bares the physical effects of time, chemical decay, and even rot and mould, the pre-existing footage is further manipulated to create new works that draw attention to the materiality of the film. Scored with strangely haunting soundtracks by Lawrence, these films offer a dreamlink exploration of memory and film. We will be showing: Girl on Fire; White Sands; Monsignor Blood; From Water; Fragments of a Horse; Goldtop Mountain; Holiday; Aloha Hawaii; Sepia Canoe; Henry Weston Smith; Alien Christ; Reno
14:00 Bad Brains: A Band in DC
Advanced, discounted tickets are available for £3.50 + booking fee at: www.wegottickets.com or for £5 at the door.
In the second session curated by Jack Sargeant, we will be screening Many Stein and Ben Logan's 2010 documentary BAD BRAINS: A BAND IN DC.
Bad Brains were already unique when they formed in 1977, gaining an immediate fan base in their native Washington DC for their blistering hardcore punk shows. But Bad Brains had already cut their musical teeth playing jazz fusion under the name Mind Power, and their version of punk was already pushing in different directions.
While inspiring the likes of youngsters Henry Rollins (Black Flag) and Ian MacKaye (Minor Threat and Fugazi) and countless others, Bad Brains were already a step ahead of their contemporaries and embraced reggae, further adding to their musical palette.
Following the band’s career through ups and numerous, often painful, downs, this absorbing documentary from director Mandy Stein (Burning Down the House: the Story of CBGB and Too Tough To Die: A Tribute to Johnny Ramone) and Ben Logan combines scorching live footage with interviews with all the major players and the band, as well as charting their comeback tour and the group’s often-fraught internal relationships.
“the film is kinetic, frenetic… and well paced with lots to love for any Bad Brains, punk or music fans. Their tribute is long overdue and we should be thankful that a film recognizing their musical genius, originality and influence exists at all.” - IndieWire.
16:00 Vigilante Vigilante: The Battle for Expression
Advanced, discounted tickets are available for £3.50 + booking fee at: www.wegottickets.com or for £5 at the door.
In the final session curated by Jack Sargeant, we will be screening the documentary about anti-graffiti actions, VIGILANTE VIGILANTE.
Graffiti has long decorated the urban landscape, but now it has new adversaries: self-appointed anti-graffiti vigilantes. Lone individuals dedicated to keeping the environment free of all street art, posters, tags and graffiti, they believe in cleaning up the environment even while they slop cheap grey paint over luminescent art, tear and rip-down posters, scratch at stickers and worse. Following these wannabe guardians of urban space, verite documentarians Max Good and Nathan Wollman examine all aspects of street art, and – thanks to interviews from numerous artists and others – they explore not just the visual contributions that it gives to cities but the various ways in which everybody engages with the urban environment.
Max Good, the producer, director and cinematographer, recently worked as an assistant producer and distribution manager on the Academy Award® nominated documentary feature The Most Dangerous Man in America: Daniel Ellsberg and the Pentagon Papers (2009). Previously, Good co-produced B.I.K.E (2006), a documentary feature on the underground culture of mutant bicycle gangs that screened at NYC’s MOMA, the Slamdance, Silverdocs, and Ann Arbor Film Festivals, and aired on Canal Plus (France) and HBO Poland. He has also directed several short films, including Gangster Administration (2005) and Smooth (2009), as well as Ungonquinlenos (2006), in collaboration with producer Nathan Wollman. Having been involved with graffiti and street art culture for over 15 years on both coasts, Good was drawn into exploring the phenomenon through it’s most dedicated enemies. He has also spent a large amount of his time involved in political activism over the last 10 years and sees his films as an avenue to promote awareness and tolerance, as well as to entertain.
Nathan Wollman, the producer, is an emerging producer from the San Francisco Bay Area. He has worked on numerous projects from narrative film shorts to musical compositions and is now focusing primarily on documentary film. Nathan has worked as a production assistant on set for Comedy Central’s Battle Bots Series, production coordinator for Italian television with FIAT motor company providing vintage vehicle props, and has produced his first feature documentary film, Vigilante Vigilante.
18:00 Temple Wood: A Quest for Freedom
Advanced, discounted tickets are available for £3.50 + booking fee at: www.wegottickets.com or for £5 at the door.
Folk horror!? YES! Ethan Race's debut feature, Temple Wood: A Quest for Freedom, will be screening at the 2012 London Underground Film Festival.
Set around a village located deep in the Scottish Highlands, Temple Wood: A Quest for Freedom tells the story of Martin’s odyssey into a nightmarish world of Pagan sexual rituals and Druidic practices whilst searching for his beloved tutor who has mysteriously disappeared.
Combining the bizarre atmosphere of the cult-movie ‘folk-horror’ genre with the thematic weight and experimentalism of an ‘art house’ film, Temple Wood depicts a young man’s journey into his subconscious whereby he must come to terms with an abusive childhood and his own repressed sexuality.
Temple Wood is the result of a seven year search for a creative method of film making which can truthfully express the nature of the mind. Drawing inspiration from David Lynch’s Inland Empire, where, in refusing to scrutinize his ideas with logic Lynch chose rather to construct the film based on a belief that ‘because all things are unified, this idea over here would somehow relate to that idea over there’, Ethan Race set off for the Highlands to shoot the film with nothing but a loose script and a set of constantly evolving ideas. The result is an organic expression of the mind’s undying will to be free from the repression that controls it through fear.
Ethan Race began experimenting with video when he was aged 14 and his first short film Conflict won the BBC Blast Future Film Awards leading it to be premiered at the BFI and screened on BBC2. Five short films later and with another T.V director’s credit, he produced Temple Wood completely independently which, at 60 minutes in length, marks his first feature length film. It was filmed over the period of a year during which he traveled around the Scottish highlands in a camper van with minimal crew and equipment, filming and improvising scenes at various historic sites in the Scottish Highlands.
20:00 Vodka and Chips
Advanced, discounted tickets are available for £3.50 + booking fee at: www.wegottickets.com or for £5 at the door.
Vodka and Chips, a comedy feature film written by, produced by and starring a septuagenarian from Birmingham, is the tale of an eccentric widow who unwittingly befriends a Russian gangster and ends up taking on the Mafia.Teaming up with Lex Dovak, a Russian-born director, cameraman and actor, actress Sheila Evans and husband Bill formed a new company – Thunderstruck Film Corporation – and assembled an enthusiastic cast and crew. Shelia revels in the part of Kitty, a lonely and eccentric widow who is being haunted by nightly apparitions, resulting in her having a short stay in a psychiatric unit. Meanwhile in Russia, two Mafia gangsters double-cross their boss Gregor (an enjoyably cliched Mr Big complete with silk dressing gown and large cigar) and flee the country...
ART: PISS FACTORY Exhibition of new works by Justyna Burzynska. A mixed media display of post-humour cyber folk. Unknown memes, neurotic graphics, visual poems and old fashioned illustration. http://misanthropop.net/justynaburzynska/