UK's Largest Rural Film Festival - BORDERLINES 2011

Sometimes living in a big town or city or easy access to one of those places you take for granted everywhere else gets access to what you see,do or buy. We are all passionate movie fans but what if you live in a rural part of the country where you have to travel a long distance, you have new car or the facilities where you are virtually zero or just plain poor? It must be heartache for some movie fans but there is an fantastic film festival based in the UK which gives film fans a chance to watch some great movies, The Borderlines Film Festival.

Now in its 9th year and is getting bigger every year the festival brings the movies to the rural based film fans giving them a chance to see a wide selection of great movies of new and Old. 200 screenings over in 37 venues, 3 counties (over a 17 day period which starts on 25th March until 10th April.

Last year 12,000 tickets were sold and this year and with recent sucess of the festival they will easily beat 12,000. Some of special guestsattending  directors Nic Roeg and Patrick Keiller, silent pianist Neil Brand, and comedienne Jo Brand. Some of the movies the rural movie fans will check out 127 Hours, Abel,  Black Swan, Uncle Boomee Who Can Recall Past Lives, Never Let Me Go, Blue Valentine. There is also a wide selection of classic movies on offer too including The Big Lebowski, Rashomon, Some Like It Hot and Bonnie & Clyde.

Below is the offical press release which was sent to myself which gives you a little insight into whats on offer and to find how to purchase tickets, get full programme details as well as where the festival venues are please go to the festivals website at:

Refreshing the Parts That Others Don’t Reach

9th BORDERLINES FILM FESTIVAL

25 March - 10 April 2011

www.borderlinesfilmfestival.org

UK’s Largest Rural Film Festival
200 Screenings in 17 Days in
37 Venues across 3 Counties
Covering 2000 Square Miles

The UK’s largest rural film festival, the 9th Borderlines Film Festival returns to The Courtyard, Hereford this spring (25 March – 10 April), and also to 36 other temporary cinemas housed in remote country venues. Locations as diverse as: Ludlow’s georgian Assembly Rooms, Wem Town Hall, and Ledbury Market Theatre, as well as numerous village and church halls, schools, film societies, a Norman Church - St Peter’s in Peterchurch, which doubles up as a community café and public library – and the backrooms of pubs dotted all over 2000 square miles of Herefordshire, Shropshire and the Welsh Marches. 

Borderlines will once again bring a smorgasbord of all things cinematic to the off-the-beaten track doorsteps of the 12,500+ rural film fans that bought tickets last year. From the briefest short made on a micro budget, to Hollywood blockbusters, this year’s event promises to present its usual eclectic mix of brand new features, cult classics, high profile guests, tributes and themed programmes, documentaries and family features.

The 2011 Festival is dedicated to the memory of Shropshire resident and Borderlines supporter, actor Pete Postlethwaite who most recently visited the Festival in 2009 to introduce a screening of The Age of Stupid. 

Borderlines is rural success story says Festival Producer Naomi Vera-Sanso: “It’s testament to the burgeoning popularity of Borderlines Film Festival and to the growing appetite for independent cinema, that our audiences increased by an impressive 23% last year. Hot tickets weren’t just for the mainstream hits such as An Education and Up In the Air, a small Japanese film, Departures, won the Festival’s Favourite Film poll, showing that rural audiences are just as cine-literate as their urban counterparts!"

She continues: “ However successful Borderlines is at satisfying the rural appetite for cinema, it is still a one-off, annual event. So we are really pleased that this year’s Festival will host the launch of Shropshire Screen, a new pilot scheme that will radically change the cinema-going experience for rural film fans in Shropshire throughout the year. This splendid new initiative will introduce state of the art digital equipment into Shropshire giving more film fans in remote communities the chance to enjoy the communal experience of cinema”. 

Festival Director David Gillam, who is responsible for programming, agrees: “Sometimes the wait for new films can be as long as three months for non-metropolitan areas, and many foreign language films don’t make it at all outside the main cities. Borderlines Film Festival’s remit is to redress that balance and take as wide a selection of new features as possible and screen them in the small towns and villages in rural Herefordshire, Shropshire, and Powys.”

2011 Festival Highlights:

* Special Guests – Special guests who have visited the Festival since its inception in 2003 have included: Gillies MacKinnon, Sophie Fiennes, Alex Cox, Stephen Frears, Terry Jones, Beeban Kidron and Jan Dunn. The 2011 line-up will include: comedienne Jo Brand, who will chose her “Desert Island Films”; silent film pianist Neil Brand; director Patrick Keiller (Robinson In Ruins); Steven Severin (ex Siouxsie and the Banshees bassist) who will present his new score to Jean Cocteau’s Blood of a Poet); and director Marc Evans (Patagonia).

This year’s Festival features several movies on a musical theme: Producer Natasha Carlish introduces her film Soul Boy at Wem Town Hall on 7 April; ex-members of Mott the Hoople will attend the screening of Chris Hall and Mike Kerry’s documentary, The Ballad of Mott the Hoople on opening night; the makers of Birmingham music documentary, will introduce their film, Made in Birmingham: Reggae Punk Bhangra; Super Furry Animal Gruff Rhys’s magical realist road movie Separado will screen on 27 March, and Hereford Community choir, The Fire Choir will perform before the film Fezeka’s Voice, a documentary about a South African choir’s trip to the UK.

More special guests will be announced nearer the time.

* Film Screenings – New movies screening this year include: 127 Hours (Danny Boyle); Abel (Diego Luna); Animal Kingdom (David Michod); Biutiful (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu); Benda Bilili (Renaud Barrett, Florent de la Tullaye); Black Swan (Darren Aronofsky); Circo (Aaron Shock); La Danse: The Paris Opera Ballet (Fred Wiseman); Fezeka’s Voice (Holly Lubbock); Into Eternity (Michael Madsen); Never Let Me Go (Mark Romanek); Exit Through the Gift Shop (Unknown); Norteado (Rigoberto Perezcano); Of Gods & Men (Xavier Beauvois); Protektor (Marek Najbrt); Blue Valentine (Derek Cianfrance); Samson & Delilah (Warwick Thornton); The Secret In Their Eyes (Juan Jose Campanella); The Time That Remains (Elia Suleiman); True Grit (Ethan and Joel Coen); Waste Land (Lucy Walker, Karen Harley, Joao Jardim); West is West (Andy DeEmmony); With Gilbert & George (Julian Cole); Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives (Apichatpong Weerasethakul), and Winter’s Bone (Debra Granik).

Classic movie matinees, a popular feature in the Festival include: The Big Lebowski (Ethan and Joel Coen); Bonnie & Clyde (Arthur Penn); The Shop Around the Corner (Ernest Lubitsch); Some Like It Hot (Billy Wilder); An American in Paris (Vincente Minnelli); Rashomon (Akira Kurosawa), and The River (Jean Renoir).

* Under Open Skies – A biennial wildlife film competition launched last year, Under Open Skies seeks to screen the best new documentaries on Britain’s natural world. With nearly half of Britain's native land mammals now considered a priority for conservation, farmland birds becoming a rarity and one in five wild plants facing extinction, the competition offers a timely opportunity for amateur and professional wildlife filmmakers to showcase their work.

Shortlisted films in both amateur and professional categories will be screened over a single day with the winners selected by a jury of experts in the field. The overall winning film will receive the Harry Williamson Award, a cash prize sponsored by Wyevale Nurseries in the memory of their founder, Harry Williamson, who was also an amateur filmmaker. Williamson had a remarkable passion for his native Herefordshire, making over eleven films in the course of twenty years which have been seen by thousands of people around the county in the film shows he set up to support Herefordshire Nature Trust.

* Rewind Community Film Archive Project – Special Festival screenings (at village halls in Eye and Moccas) that are the culmination of a 6-month project to collate hundreds of hours of archive films from the independently owned Huntley Film Archives. A fascinating treasure chest of films, most of which have been unseen for years including footage by photographic innovator, Alfred Watkins, of Kitchener’s Army marching off from Hereford to WW1. www.rewindarchive.org.uk

* Shropshire Screen Launch – A new rural digital cinema initiative, Shropshire Screen, will be launched at Borderlines. The three-year pilot scheme to increase access to cinema to rural areas by introducing the latest digital equipment was announced by the UK Film Council in July 2009. Shropshire is one of three areas (the other are North Yorkshire and Wiltshire), which were selected to share the £1.2 million of lottery funding. After the scheme ends the findings will aid plans for any future national scheme. Shropshire Screen will pilot high standard mobile digital projection equipment, giving rural audiences the chance to enjoy a modern digital cinema experience. The advanced equipment will also enable extra features such as screenings of 3D films and live satellite events, such as opera, theatre and sport. www.ukfilmcouncil.org/rural