Raindance Film Festival Awards 2012

The 20th Raindance Festival came to an end on Sunday night with its closing gala feature, Sal closing the curtain on a successful fortnight in the capital. The independent festival achieved record attendance numbers with Londoners out in force to take in the best independent cinema from around the world. Short films, music videos, discussions, workshops, documentaries and debuts made up an eclectic 12 days at Piccadilly’s Apollo cinema.

    For some there was more at stake than merely the enjoyment of seeing your film play out to the masses as the competition element of the festival was decided and the gongs handed out. There was a distinctly Scandinavian tone to the ceremony with the recipients of Best Debut Feature and Best Documentary coming from Finland and Denmark. Scooping the former, Indebted is the downbeat Finnish tale of the lengths people will go to for money while the Danish documentary Ballroom Dancer focuses on esteemed Russian dancer Slavik Kryklyvy striving to regain his status several years after an injury forced him to retire.

    There was success too for Love tomorrow which took home the prize for Best UK Feature. The film has echoes of Sliding Doors’ time concept as it follows the 24 hour period after a chance encounter between two dancers in a London tube station. Laurentie was the only film to pick up a prize away from Europe as the slow burning Canadian film was awarded the Best International Feature accolade.
Full Nomination/Winners List 

BEST INTERNATIONAL FEATURE

Dark Hearts
Laurentie [winner]
From Tuesday To Tuesday
Vegetarian Cannibal
A Road Stained Crimson
SAL

BEST UK FEATURE

City Slacker
Confine
Live East Die Young
Love Tomorrow [winner]
String Caesar

BEST DEBUT FEATURE

After School Midnighters
The Ascent
Bad Hair Friday
Indebted [winner]
A Night Too Young
Strings

BEST DOCUMENTARY

Ballroom Dancer [winner]
Despite The Gods
The Lottery of Birth
Orania
Over My Dead Body
Trashed

BEST UK SHORTS

Achele
Bird
For Elsie
Mapmaker
The Pub [winner]
A Thousand Empty Glasses               

BEST INTERNATIONAL SHORTS

Bolero
Buzkashi Boys [winner]
The End
The Foreigner 
Interview Date               
The Old Woman             
            

FILM OF THE FESTIVAL [SHORT]

For the sixth year running we are very excited to announce the Film of the Festival Award. This year’s award is supported by the Independent Film Trust and the winner will make next year's cinema advert.

One of the short films at the festival will be awarded Film Of The Festival. This film will be shortlisted for an 2013 Oscar^TM Nomination for Best Short Film.
The winner is:
Buzkashi Boys

FILM OF THE FESTIVAL [FEATURE]

Awarded to the feature film or documentary that best embodies the spirit of Raindance. The nominations are:
Death
How Do You Write a Joe Schermann Song? [winner]
Corrode
Frank
Consuming Spirits
This Ain't California

Raindance 2012: Sunset Strip:The Movie Review

★★ 1/2☆☆

With Sunset Strip, one suspects that director Hans Fjellestad hopes he has drafted the definitive autobiography of that most insalubrious of American landmarks, Hollywood Boulevard. The reality is that this 93 minute love letter to sex, drugs and rock n’ roll feels more like an extended anecdote than anything else.

Fjellestad has wrung his contacts book to its very limits to populate his movie with anyone and everyone with even the tiniest connection to the world famous mile-and-a-half stretch of tarmac. Johnny Depp, Keanu Reeves, Paris Hilton, Dan Aykroyd (plugging his own vodka), and Kenneth Anger, amongst others, all pop up to wax lyrical about the world famous street, and let us know just what it is that makes the place so special.

The interviews are woven together in such a way as to concentrate either on a particular period in Los Angeles history, or a single bar, hotel or street corner to give us a sense of time and of space; to inject a sense of character into the lifeless brickwork. Not surprisingly, the interviews tend to concentrate on the seedier aspects of life on the strip; the drugs, the drink, the illicit trysts; at the expense of imparting any real practical or historical information.

What’s driven home here is that everyone involved has been profoundly affected in some way by Hollywood Boulevard, by its history, its character, and its “je ne sais quoi”. Mickey Rourke explains: “Your dreams can start out there, and your dreams will end there…”

All those little stories of celebrities having such a jolly good time: Kelly Osbourne’s lost virginity, Billy Corgan’s realisation that “he’d arrived”, or Tommy Lee’s public fellatio, make for entertaining, if irrelevant viewing. For all Fjellestad’s attempts to paint The Strip’s cultural history, there’s a distinct lack of actual history; a refusal to look beyond the scandal to view the filthy heart of Hollywood Boulevard and actually see what’s going on, or why.

It’s the prevailing sense of sense-congratulation amongst so many of those interviewed that leaves you feeling as if the secret to Sunset Strip is little more than a self perpetuating myth. Famous people flock there because famous people flock there. Either that or it just has a… I don’t know what.

Chris Banks (@Chris_in_2D)

Rating: 15
Screening Dates: Thursday 27 September ,Monday 1 October (20:45)
Directed by: Hans Fjellestad
Cast: Cisco Adler, Lou Adler, Ahmed Ahmed, Dan Aykroyd,

Raindance 2012:Vinyl Review

★★★☆☆

Washed-up punk-rocker Johnny Jones (Phil Daniels) begs a record company head-honcho to re-sign his band Weapons of Happiness after decades on the scrap-heap, only to be refused on the grounds that listening to anyone over the age of 30 sing is like “watching your parents having sex”. Faced with rejection, and staring at an anonymous middle-age spent in various caravan parks, Johnny hatches a plan to re-launch his music career. Assemble a group of TV-friendly kids as a front for his band; the kids can mime and wave, while Johnny and his pals roll back the years and kick out the jams backstage.

Johnny and his bandmates’ auditions for likely teenyboppers unearth the talents of troubled youngster Drainpipe (Jamie Blackley), a kid with a reckless streak, a passion at odds with the plastic, wipe-clean façade of the pop group he should be a poster boy for, and showmanship similar to that of Johnny himself. The band is launched, and their first single becomes an unlikely success.

Sara Sugarman’s warm-hearted tale of men behaving badly, and musically maladroit youths is based on the real-life story of Welsh band The Alarm who pulled of a similar hoax of their own in 2004. Vinyl extolls the virtues of six strings, pub gigs and cramped tour buses, over the auto-tuned, pre-packaged pop of X-Factor and the like. But while it invokes the spirit of the Sex Pistols, Buzzcocks and The Great Rock n’ Roll Swindle, Vinyl lacks the element of unpredictability so integral to the punk music it worships. It feels safer, less anarchic even than School Of Rock, a film with which it shares a certain DNA.

That’s not to say it lacks heart or humour. Daniels makes a decent fist of injecting sympathy into the selfish, pig-headed, oldest swinger in town, Johnny Jones. As the bad-boy of the Welsh seaside, Blackley radiates the impulsiveness and sex-appeal so obvious in the best and most dangerous of rock stars. Weapons of Happiness guitarist turned nursing home impresario, Perry Benson reminds us just what a fine comic actor he is also.

It probably won’t have you dusting off the leathers, but it will make you chuckle as it gives Simon Cowell a gentle kick up the backside.

Chris Banks (@Chris_in_2D)

Rating: 15
Screening Dates: Thursday 27 September ,Monday 1 October (15:00), 1st March 2013 (UK)
Directed by: Sara Sugarman Cast: Keith Allen, Phil Daniels , Jamie Blackley 

Raindance 2012:Orania Review

★★☆☆☆

    For those used to documentaries coming with narrators, music and handy voice-overs to point you in the way of a feeling, it might take some adjustment to get used to watching Orania. This German documentary focussing on the titled area of South Africa is something of a flashback to the slower pace of old television documentaries, a study of a topic where shots are held, there is no voiceover or friendly voiced interviewer probing the locals and no running monologue theorising what we’ve just seen on screen. The area in question lies in the Northern Cape of South Africa, a vast area surrounded by, well, nothing really. A community in the centre of this region  are isolated and cut-off from the rest of their nation, not imposed on them but rather by their own choice in an attempt to maintain the core values they hold dear. This is Orania and Orania is strictly whites-only South Africa. Decades after the ending of Apartheid, this small rural spot has been chosen to house numbers of Afrikaans, oppose to joining in the multiculturalism of the world outside in favour of building a nesting place for similarly minded Boers around the country. It’s a community headed by a group of elders, keen to install their values in the next generation of Afrikaans, an idea that was born by what they see as necessary to preserve their culture.

    It’s a culture that holds work and religion as the key pillars of their community, something that’s drilled into you upon arrival where the street signs are a flashback to 50’s style American small-town billboards, reading like a town manifesto ‘Self working, self reliant’, ‘winners never get discouraged, discouragers never win’ and ‘our ideal binds us together’. Ah yes, the ideal. What exactly is the ideal of Oranians? Racism is keenly discarded as part of it by all on camera, although there are clear signs that if it isn’t at least overt or violent it is definitely discrimatory and impassive. A local swimming pool owner jumps at the chance to prove his chumminess with his black delivery man but the stilted exchange and acknowledgment by both that he must not go within 25m of the towns borders only go to heighten the underlying prejudices. There’s also the intimidating billboard that reads “I speak and think in Afrikaans”. It’s more guarded within the older, establishing members of the community believing their country’s rainbow nation as a “recipe for disaster” a notion dating back centuries. They see their role as keepers of their European ancestors’ way of life, one threatened by the black locals who, centuries ago, were initially the employees of these ancestors. This refusal to accept any kind of multiculturalism is an intriguing line to follow, one frustratingly ignored or brushed over at times by director Tobias Lindner who perhaps sees that as a different sort of documentary which is feasible enough - Louis Theroux has already lived amongst a similar Boer community for television and you sense Lindner wants to bring us a more rounded view of life within the walls (metaphorical, they haven’t bricked themselves in. Yet).

    We arrive in Orania with new a family including Mum, teenage son and minibus driver Dad. The father comes with aspirations of a fruitful business ferrying the locals around and out of town “transport is the bond between Orainia and the new South Africa.”, until he realises the locals’ pesky lack of interest in the new South Africa gets in the way. He also takes to the airwaves to reel in new clients where he is warned to address the issue of ‘foreigners’ on the bus – his Afrikaans speaking only admission is still deemed too liberal for some. The radio station itself is seen as the voice of Orania, becoming a mainstay in the film coming across a  perfectly pitched parody of a hospital radio station from the fifties and often delivering the funniest moments: two old ladies read a ‘recipe of the day’ about Quince and there’s a no-panic approach when the internet goes down (again) meaning the already-on-air weather report is unknown, “Oh well, let’s speculate” continues the presenter as he proceeds to look out the window and report what it looks like.

    This dated looking life continues in the distinctly 80’s school video looking introductory video that the teenage son has to watch, one that explains what is expected of him – a lot of work on farms – and ending with the sign off “Orania is not for sissies”. His friendship with his charismatic housemate – a former Johannesburg resident with a few records to his name - is the easiest to enjoy in the film and his subsequent ban from Orania serves to ruin it for us as well as him. You can sense that Lindner was just as upset knowing his best character was no longer in town but has his fingers in enough other story pies to go back to.

Unfortunately none can quite hold our attention as easily and heightens the sense of a lack of focus in the film. Orania the place is a potentially fascinating area of interest sadly Orania the film seldom peeks this interest.

Matthew Walsh

Rating:12
Release Date: Friday 28 September (18:30- World Première) Tuesday 2 October (12:45)
Directed by: Tobias Lindner
Cast: n/a

Raindance 2012: Percival's Big Night Out Review

★★★☆☆

Claustrophobics beware; Percival’s Big Night may not be the film for you. An exercise in lo-fi film making, William C. Sullivan’s feature is shot in one take on one camera in one room of a small New York apartment. The plot is similarly taught; Sal, a weed dealer (or self-coined ‘herbal entrepreneur’) and his aspiring actor housemate Percival wait for Chloe, the formers client and the latter’s hopeful love interest, to come over and pick up drugs thus giving Percival the opportunity to have his big night with her.

    There is little room for much other than dialogue in such a tight set-up and that is what we get. The first 20 minutes are the two housemates, introducing the key characteristics of each one within seconds of their introduction. Sal is a weed dealer – you know by now what this entails and is predictably a mix between Seth Rogan style stoner and artsy style stoner, while Percival bar tends waiting for his acting break. He is also the romantic of the pair believing a 5 minute conversation he had with Chloe to be enough to convince him she’s the one. The conversation between the two housemates is that almost familiar style of talking where there’s an element of forced improvisation with each involved trying to get the last, droll humourous put down in before topics change. Insults are traded in the form of what some would call ‘banter’ before steaks are raised, truths are told and fights ensue. All this in 15 minutes leaves you wondering how a pair of stoners can pick up such energy for all of it but their bromantic bickering can only hold our attention for so long and thankfully the arrival of Chloe and friend Riku flesh out what was starting to look like an internet comedy.

    The four soon share an impromptu double date centred around a bong and a lot of ease-dropping. There’s more than a sniff of mumblecore about the talky roots of PBN but it doesn’t quite match the oft-mimicked genre’s subtlety. Conversations grow from the minute to the life-changing in a matter of seconds as each character is treated to their own part of the mid-20’s ‘I’m lost’ realisation at the first hint of provocation. The self-analysis on show by Chloe and Percival in particular reach levels that make the ‘real time’ effect somewhat hard to believe. Characters go from being introduced to trading their darkest secrets and most vulnerable emotions without the presence of any form of catalyst.

    Perhaps this is a bit harsh for what is an incredibly effective and cost-efficient production. Sullivan manages to keep our attention for the duration of the film with the largely improvised script holding a tight enough structure to ensure nothing feels flabby or overworked. However, the US indie scene is quickly becoming a repetitive and predictable one, one where a film like this only adds to the countless others within or closely nestled outside the Duplass mumblecore world and while there’s an admirable quality to the self-imposed limits of Percival’s Big Night there’s little that adds anything new to the scene.

Matthew Walsh

Rating:15
Screening Dates: Sunday 30 September (18:30) Wednesday 3 October(16:00)
Directed By: William Sullivan
Cast: Tommy Nelms, Jarret F. Kerr , Sarah Wharton