ONLY SOUND REMAINS, the graduation film of Arash Ashtiani, produced by Anshu Poddar, has been nominated for a BAFTA for Best Short Film. Other LFS graduates involved were DOP Pierre-Alain Giraud, production designer Theofano Pitsillidou, camera operator Sam Arjmand and sound recordist Jhana Weekes.
The Orange British Academy Film Awards ceremony will be broadcast on BBC One on Sunday 12 February.
Unique partnership will support emerging filmmakers
Britain’s film industry is set to receive a boost as a result of a new partnership between the University of Exeter and the LondonFilmSchool. This five-year agreement will enable doctoral film students to hone their filmmaking skills alongside their academic studies.
The agreement was signed at the University of Exeter on Monday 9 January by University of Exeter Registrar and Chief Executive David Allen and Mike Leigh, Chairman of the London Film School (LFS) and multi-award-winning director of films including Secrets and Lies, Vera Drake and, most recently, Another Year. They were joined by Professor Nick Kaye, Dean of the College of Humanities, Ben Gibson, Director of the LFS, and Alan Bernstein, Head of Studies at the LFS.
The alliance will enable the institutions to launch the new Exeter-London Film School Doctoral Programme. Unique in the UK, this programme will offer students the opportunity to develop both research and professional skills in film. They will have access to the professional expertise, experience and facilities at the LFS as well as to the academic excellence of researchers, research culture, and academic resources at the University of Exeter. Ultimately students will need to demonstrate not only the scholarly research required of a doctorate but also professional craft excellence through the creation and submission of a finished film.
Mike Leigh, Chairman of the LFS commented: “Our new relationship with the College of Humanities at Exeter is very exciting. It's gratifying to be working with kindred spirits, and I'm confident that this doctoral programme will play a vital role in the serious, innovative cinema of tomorrow.”
Dean of the College of Humanities Professor Nick Kaye said: “We are hugely excited to be embarking on this exceptional journey with the LondonFilmSchool. By combining our strengths we are able to offer innovative and exciting opportunities for postgraduate research that will not only benefit students, but also the film industry. I look forward to a very fruitful partnership.”
The Director of the LFS, Ben Gibson, added, “As a School, we're committed to finding the right ways for filmmakers to develop their ideas and their craft. This is the first time that a PhD programme based on practice has been able to take the craft element at its
full value, and to balance the process and the outcome in a way that will make the fruits of research visible. Our colleagues at the College of Humanities are ambitious and radical. This will be an important Partnership.”
Since 1956 LFS has trained thousands of directors, cinematographers, editors and other film professionals now working across the globe. Alumni include many great filmmakers and very successful technicians, covering all kinds of cinema - names like Mike Leigh, Michael Mann, Tak Fujimoto, Roger Pratt, Ueli Steiger, Iain Smith, Danny Huston, Franc Roddam, Anne Hui, Duncan Jones and Bill Douglas. LFS is one of only three ‘Skillset Film Academies’, accredited by the UK film industry as centres of excellence.
Teaching and research in Film Studies, offered through the College of Humanities at the University of Exeter, draws on world-class film research resources and a wide range of staff expertise which spans film history and theory across American, East Asian, European, African and other World cinemas. The Bill Douglas Centre at the University of Exeter provides a research collection of international stature. The museum illustrates the development of optical recreation and popular entertainment from the late 18th century to Classical Hollywood and the present day. Complementing the University's existing extensive resources for the study of popular culture, the Collection's 18,000 books give Exeter the country's largest University library on cinema.
Ends
About the University of Exeter
The University of Exeter is a leading UK university and in the top one percent of institutions globally. It combines world-class research with very high levels of student satisfaction. Exeter is ranked 9th in The Sunday Times University Guide, 10th in the UK in The TimesGoodUniversity Guide 2012 and 11th in the GuardianUniversity Guide 2012. In the 2008 Research Assessment Exercise (RAE) 90% of the University’s research was rated as being at internationally recognised levels and 16 of its 31 subjects are ranked in the top 10, with 27 subjects ranked in the top 20.
The University has over 17,000 students and is developing its campuses in Exeter and Cornwall with almost £350 million worth of new facilities due for completion by 2012.
The LFS mission is to provide an environment for excellent filmmaking, matching issues of craft and technology with the development of creativity and collaboration. LFS offers a core multi-department filmmaking programme, the 2 year MA Filmmaking, a one-year MA Screenwriting and a recently launched MA in Film Curating, plus an expanding range of professional development courses, under the LFS Workshops banner.
The MA Filmmaking degree is based on the conviction that students benefit from a professional working base in all technical departments and craft skills. LFS is structured as a working studio in which every student works on a minimum of one film in every twelve week term and usually more, participating as a head of department in a minimum of five exercise films and a graduation film through the two years. It is one of only a handful of schools in the world which features truly industrial level film exercises on 35mm.
The school makes around 180 film exercises and graduation projects each year and in 2011 participated in over 150 festivals, winning 30 first prizes.
Raz de la Torre, who graduated this year, has already had huge success in the Philippines with his first feature, a romantic comedy titled, "Won't Last A Day Without You", which he wrote and directed. It was released on 30 November 2011 in over 120 cinemas all over the Philippines and opened at PhP20M, one of the highest openings for a locally produced movie ever.
Other credits this year are a 2-part documentary on sustainable energy for the ABS-CBN NEWS CHANNEL (ANC) and the International Finance Corporation (IFC) and three episodes of MMK, the longest running drama anthology in the Philippines, for ABS-CBN, the biggest television network. Two episodes have received top ratings when broadcast. The third is currently in production.
"My professional experience before LFS was purely in screenwriting. But because of the wholistic, hands-on MA programme in filmmaking, the transition to directing/production was quick and successful for me", said Raz.
Story from Screendaily about LFS MA Filmmaking graduate Henry Darke, who participated in the school's Hothouse development programme.
UK director Henry Darke plans Cornwall-set feature Crooked Hill
16 December, 2011 | By Wendy Mitchell
Award-winning short Big Mouth inspires new feature, which is part of Hothouse scheme.
UK writer/director Henry Darke was at the Les Arcs European Film Festival pitching his debut feature, Crooked Hill.
The Cornwall-set feature is inspired by his latest short, Big Mouth, which is a coming-of-age story about a deaf boy.
“It’s about a guy trying to keep his dysfunctional family together, even though his father is a heroin addict,” Darke notes. “It’s social realist but also quite cinematic.”
He plans to shoot the feature a budget of less than £500,000 in Cornish towns Camborne, Newquay and Padstow. (The director was born in Cornwall but now lives in London). That short played at the 2010 BFI London Film Festival and won a special mention at Encounters.
Crooked Hill is part of the LFS Hothouse development atelier and is now at the third draft stage, and nearly ready to send out to potential financiers. Lisa Williams, who works with Kevin Loader’s Free Range Films, will produce.
Darke also has another feature script in development with The Bureau’s Save Our Scripts initiative and producers Camille Gatin & Dan McCulloch. Road trip comedy Where The Bulls Run is about two brothers taking a bike trip in the Basque Country on route to the running of the bulls in Pamplona. “Their sibling rivalry is made worse when they meet a Basque girl,” he adds.
And he also has another project in development with Big Mouth producer Philip Herd, which will star Adeel Akhtar (who recently starred in Darke’s Hooked for Channel 4’s Coming Up strand). That London-set story is also about two brothers, one who has been scared to leave home and the other who is — on the surface at least — living the high life in Shoreditch.
He is repped by Tally Garner at Curtis Brown.
Aygul Bakanova's graduation film THE SONG OF THE RAIN (JAMGYR) continues its festival success, having been selected for International Competition at the Clermont-Ferrand Film Festival (27 Jan - 4 Feb). The film had its world premiere at the Locarno Film Festival and has also been selected for Festival Premiers Plans d'Angers.
More info at http://www.clermont-filmfest.com/index.php?m=134
LFS Graduation films AMAN directed by Ali Jaberansari and THE SONG OF THE RAIN, directed by Aygul Bakanova, shot by Christine Lalla, edited by Shuang Zou and co-produced by Fyodor Druzin, have both been selected for official competition at the Festival Premier Plans d'Angers (Jan 20 - 27)
http://www.premiersplans.org/festival/en/selection_officielle-competition-FE.php
MA filmmaking student Gia LaSalvia was a winner of the BBC/Open University Creative Climate Film project. Her short 'Hot and Bothered' was one of ten films commissioned.
"As part of the Open University Creative Climate project the OU and BBC have worked to make space for some fresh approaches to environmental issues. Most environment communications are as dull as the issues are important. Leading creative talent from the UK’s top film schools has responded with a mix of drama, animation and factual films. Twenty were shortlisted from over eighty submissions and pitched to an expert panel chaired by Lord Puttnam, from which ten were finally commissioned. We offered some advice on craft and the students had access to expert advice on the environmental issues they were working with, although both editorially and in film making terms these are very much their own work. The films include plenty of sparky new ideas and tones. There are sparkling gems of environmental communication amongst these ten films, yet they were made to a tight deadline on tiny budgets. They show what can be done when new talent is invited in to look at a problem. All of the films touch on themes being addressed for-real by people, but the whole package taken together serves to underline the fact that human beings almost certainly have the wit to get out of some of the fixes that they find themselves in. Dr. John Smith, The Open University.
For more info and to view the film go to
http://www.open.edu/openlearn/body-mind/oubbc-creative-climate-short-film-competition-2011-hot-and-bothered
The Road Home, the graduation project of 2009 MA Filmmaking graduate Rahul Gandotra, has been shortlisted for consideration for The 2012 Academy Awards.
The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences have selected the 10 live action short films to go forward to the next stage of the voting process for the 84th Academy Awards. Short Films and Feature Animation Branch members will now select three to five nominees. The final nominations will be announced on January 24, 2012.
Burning Heads ("To Gala"), the first feature of LFS graduate George Siougas was released in Greece last month to rave reviews and is still in cinemas six weeks later. Siougas is now in preproduction on his next film, the "Mikis Theodorakis Project" (working title).
'Love After Sunrise' , the graduation film of Hadi Ghandour (MA Filmmaking 2011) has won three awards
at the Los Angeles International New Wave Film Festival - Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor and Best Sound Design for LFS MA Filmmaking student Jeroen Bogaert.
