I was at Sheffield Doc/Fest last week and crowd funding was everywhere, I mean EVERYWHERE! It felt like the thing that was being talk about and discussed more than ever before. A year ago it was a vague notion that was on the periphery of my experience but now I’m acutely aware of it as I’m currently in the last 24 hours of my second round of crowd funding on Indiegogo.com with my film Sound It Out. I crowd funded the shoot a few months ago and now I’m crowd funding the post production, my goal is to raise enough money to finish the film.

I also took part in the world’s first crowd funding pitch Seize the Future run by Charlie Phillips. The cash prize was raised by public donation on Indiegogo and awarded to a crowd funded project. We came in tantalisingly close second place.

So What is Crowd Funding?

A “sponsored swim” for independent filmmakers, with perks and pre-sales? A way of getting projects off the ground? The saviour of the film industry?

Here’s a short video from the Guardian at Doc/Fest including a brief mention of Sound It Out. And an article from the Guardian about the filmmakers using crowd funding.

Here’s a little bit about Sound It Out and I’ll explain why I chose to crowd fund this project”

Sound It Out is a documentary portrait of the very last surviving vinyl record shop in Teesside, which will run at between 45-60 minutes long.

Director: Jeanie Finlay (Goth Cruise – IFC) Starring: Tom, Kelly, David, Daniel, 70,000 records and the good people of Teesside.

A distinctive, funny and intimate film about men, obsession and the irreplaceable role music plays in our lives.
Think – High Fidelity with a Northern Accent.

Vinyl records are much more than just music – it’s memories and the soundtrack to our lives and the film shows us just that. I can remember the first 45 I bought with my pocket money, the song I fell in love to, and the LP that healed my broken heart, but I just don’t feel the same about an mp3.

Independent record shops are an endangered species and in the last five years alone, 500 shops in the UK have gone to the great high street in the sky. Sound It Out is a cultural haven in an area of the country that’s struggling with recession, government cuts and industrial decline. It’s important to show Sound It Out as a place that is surviving in spite of all of this and its vital place in the community.

Every penny spent in the shop makes a difference and every penny committed to the film makes a difference – it shows on screen and will help us finish the film.

As backer #126 Ange Taggart puts it – Why fund Sound It Out ? “Because small shops give us hope“. Olly Wood backer #108 puts it this way: “Click the link, watch the clip, nod in agreement, fund the film. Easy as wink.”

Why Crowd Fund?

I don’t think crowd funding will work or be suitable for every project, but there were a few things that made me believe it would work with this film:

Niche Audience – Vinyl and record collectors are a large potential audience for the film.

Low Budget – Ideal to raise a “get on with it” budget. There are an awful lot of projects on Indiegogo with aims of raising $25k plus. I think this is a big ask and it’s better to split your film into smaller more manageable chunks. Raise for shoot, post, music clearances, dvd release, etc. separately.

Committed to the Project – I really, passionately wanted to make the film. I’d been filming for about 12 months unfunded but wanted to get serious and spend more time in the shop. I didn’t want to go through the long, slow dance of meeting with broadcasters and trying the raise money the “traditional way” – crowd funding seemed like an immediate way of connecting with an audience and raising a “get on with it” shoot budget. Charlie Phillips at Doc/Fest also convinced me that it could be a good fit for this film. I had nothing to lose by trying it as an experiment!

From the outset I’ve been ambitious to not let the low budget get in the way of how I want to make the film. I asked all the people that I would choose to work with on a fully funded feature documentary. They are all my first choice. They have very generously taken token fees and helped arrange support in kind to get the film finished.

I’ve been overwhelmed by just how much support I have received in order to get the film made – from amazing funders, to record companies and artists who have donated music gratis or very cheaply, Broadway cinema who have donated space to edit and Sally Hodgson who has been working as Producer of Marketing and Distribution (PMD) in an amazing capacity, helping the film find its audience.

I owe it to everyone involved that the film is finished and is good – no pressure then!

Why IndieGoGo?

I tweeted to see if anyone had any experience with crowd funding. Danae from Indiegogo got back to me within about 5 minutes and was incredibly supportive and helpful. She completely won me over. Also they were one of the few crowd funding sites that used PayPal so I didn’t need a US bank account (unlike Kickstarter).

I met Slava Rubin at Doc/Fest last week. He is a truly positive man who believes in what he’s doing – I have never had so many high 5s in a conversation ever. Sure it’s a great business model – over 12,000 projects on Indiegogo right now, but I think there’s something deeper behind it. Engaging with communities and Doing it with Others (DIWO) was an element that was present when I was making artwork that I missed in filmmaking.

Lessons I Learnt in Crowd Funding

A trailer is not a pitch video!

The main one and a very hard one for me. I had to put my British reserve to one side. When I launched the first campaign I simply put up the trailer and we raised about 10 pence. I attended the Seize the Future workshop by Peter Broderick and Sandi DuBowski and took advice from Indiegogo old hand John Trigonis. They all told me – “Put yourself in the video”. I made a new trailer with me pitching the film and we got some bigger partners on board to help us bang the drum – in particular Record Store Day. It made a world of difference. I now believe that people invest in the filmmakers as much as the project.

DIWO
Find audience and partners out in the world – filmmakers funding other filmmakers is not a sustainable model. Find other people that can help spread the word about your project. Again, a very un-British idea to grasp but essential. It’s planning the PR, marketing and outreach before the film is even made. We’ve tried to reach out to all the different groups of people who may be interested in our film, so we’ve really tried to cast the net far and wide. Friends and family, The North East, vinyl fans, record collectors, customers of the shop, other independent record shops, record labels, flickr groups, press, radio…the list goes on. International Record Store Day have been great supporters and promoted us on their page which has a really big following.

Design good perks that people actually want. You’re not begging, you’re offering something good in exchange for backing and coming on board.

Give Credit
I think it’s really important to say thank you to everyone who supports the project. I built a funders’ page so we can put faces to names and find out why people have funded the film. We have also encouraged everyone who has become a supporter to tell their friends and help spread the word, becoming ambassadors for the project – making our reach much wider than we could on our own.

Don’t be Afraid of Asking for Help
Sally Hodgson came on board as PMD and it has been so much more fun and productive to work with someone else. Filmmaking can be a lonely business and it’s much more fun with someone else.

Any Surprises?
The most surprising moment was connecting with a stranger. In our first campaign Andrew Riggs, a US soldier serving in Iraq, saw the link on Record Store Day and came on board as an Associate Producer with a donation of $2000. It was completely overwhelming and amazing that a stranger would come on board in such an act of faith. His brother works at a vinyl pressing plant in Nashville. He liked the idea that some of the records his brother has made would be for sale in the shop.

What’s Going to Happen to the Film?

The film has been commissioned as an artwork for Sideshow in Nottingham so we’ll be showing a ‘sneak peek’ of the film, along with a discussion event and gig – Das Wanderlust and Russell and the Wolves (Teesside bands who feature in the film) playing live. December 11th 2010.

Sound It Out will be packaged like a 7” gatefold single and released on limited edition DVD for sale in independent record shops in the UK and further afield on International Record Store Day April 2011. We also plan to show the film in a series of hidden-treasure record shops.

Would I Crowd Fund Again?

Maybe…I think so…ask me in 24 hours – see if I made my budget. It is a lot of work, extra different work, in fact all the same work of a fully funded film without the crew or cushion of a film budget. BUT I have really enjoyed talking directly with the audience and just making the film instead of have 50 meetings about making a film, it’s a very liberating feeling that has made me feel like I don’t have to wait in future to make a film. My advice, find the right project, gather your team and give it a go. The surprises are worth it.

Find Sound It Out online at:
Sound It Out
Facebook Page
@sounditoutdoc

A film-maker from the North-East has made a warm, funny and insightful portrait of her home town – and its last record shop

Record shops up and down the country are facing closure. Three hundred have shut in the UK over the past decade, partly because of a loophole that has allowed online music companies to avoid VAT by shipping from the Channel Islands, thereby offering prices
that record shops couldn’t hope to match. One quietly inspiring film-maker from the North East, however, may have helped to turn the tide.

Jeanie Finlay wanted to make a film about her home town of Stockton-on-Tees, a place she describes as “like Middlesbrough, only less glamorous”. Hearing that an old school friend called Tom Butchart was running the last surviving record shop in Teesside, she

began filming. Sound It Out is a warm, funny, insightful portrait of the community based around the shop — also called Sound It Out — that has been a hit in America, after its premiere at the SXSW Festival and a review in The New York Times that raved: “Like a mint pressing in a bargain bin this film is a rare find.” It also helped Butchart to win Stockton’s Small Business of the Year award, and it has shown how important record shops can be.

“It’s an accidental film,” Finlay says. “Stockton is like the annoying member of your family that you don’t want anyone else to slag off: the high street may be nothing but charity shops and pound shops, but I’ve still got a lot of affection for the place. When I
heard that Tom, who I remembered as a shy boy with a stutter, had opened this record shop where he was the king of a very small kingdom, I decided to go up there and start filming.”

Finlay soon realised that she wasn’t making a film about the plight of a small record shop, but portraits of the people for whom Sound It Out is a haven. We meet Shane, an obsessive Status Quo fan who says “there’s nothing better than playing Quo solid for a
week” and plans to be buried in a coffin built from his melted-down record collection; Mack, who comes in from the pub and sings the record he wants until Butchart identifies it; and a pair of teenage metalheads who explain how if it wasn’t for buying records they would have killed themselves long ago.

Finlay’s film is as non-judgmental as it is revealing, with people on the margins of society celebrated for their eccentricities.

“The interesting people soon revealed themselves,” Finlay says. “Everyone kept saying to me, ‘Have you met Shane?’ I hadn’t because he was following Jean Michel Jarre on tour. Then he came back, and I knew he was brilliant from the moment I met him.”

Shane Healey is an example of the kind of person the shop attracts. A middle-aged B&Q employee with a shiny pate and long hair at the back and the sides, he was born with
cerebral palsy and water on the brain and says that he has been treated as “a spacca” for much of his life. The shop is one of the few places where he is accepted for what he is: different, but also bright and charismatic.

Then there are Frankey and John-Boy, an unemployed DJ and MC duo, who make a tinny style of dance music called makina. They look like shaven-headed tracksuit-
wearing delinquents who you would cross the street to avoid. “When I was a kid I did judo near to their estate, and I was scared of boys like them,” Finlay says. “Then you find
out they’re sweet lads who are nice to their mums.” As Butchart says: “The shop is somewhere for people to go and escape their lives for an hour. That’s important.” Or, in Mack’s words: “You can get anything you want in there … except loose women from Taiwan.”

Finlay specialises in turning her camera on marginal figures. One of her most popular documentaries is Goth Cruise, which follows 150 black-clad self-proclaimed outsider types on a luxury liner cruise from New Jersey to Bermuda. “I went to a Goth wedding a few years ago,” Finlay says. “They were talking about this cruise and I thought: can you be a Goth in the tropical heat, on a floating shopping centre?”

Absolutely. Armed with total sunblock and black bikinis, the Goths frolic on beaches and make the most of the duty-free shopping. Then there is Home-Maker, Finlay’s debut, which follows the lives of housebound people in Derbyshire and Tokyo. “It started off as a community project. I was meant to show elderly people how to use computers,” she says. “But they had absolutely no interest in learning; they just wanted to chat.”

If you’re wondering how Finlay funds her ventures, she doesn’t. Sound It Out had no backing; the editing, distribution and marketing was paid for through crowd funding, which works in much the same way as a sponsored swim.

“I’m friends with a lot of American film-makers who have no funding; they just get on with it,” she says. “You don’t know what you are making until you make it, so although I’m broke, you end up with something interesting.”

Finlay has two projects in development. The Great Hip Hop Hoax is about a pair of Scottish singers who pretended to be American rappers to land a record deal with Sony, and Orion is about the rise and fall of Jimmy “Orion” Ellis, a masked American singer briefly marketed as Elvis Presley returned from the grave. When Ellis took his mask off his career collapsed.

Sound It Out is emerging as George Osborne closes the VAT loophole that has hit record shops so hard. “Music sales have declined gradually, but CD sales migrated to offshore
internet retailers at a rapid rate due to the VAT advantage,” says Richard Allen, an independent retailer who lobbied the Government to change the law. “Normally politicians and the music industry don’t mix very well, but in this case George Osborne has made a decision that could save record shops.”

Shops such as Sound It Out may occupy a small place in British culture, but that’s what makes Finlay’s film special. “Sound It Out is about a small shop, in a small street, in a small town,” she concludes. “I’m interested in making small films. That way I get to turn the camera on people that I would never normally meet, but who turn out to be very interesting indeed.”

Sound It Out screens at selected cinemas this week. For details and to
request a screening, go to sounditoutdoc.com

2011 has been a funny old year. At the beginning I had just finished my documentary film Sound It Out and was getting ready to release it on DVD in the Stockton record shop I made the film in. In February I got the news we had got into SXSW for our world premiere and then everything changed.

Jeff Malmberg the director of Marwencol (my top film of 2010) introduced Sound It Out at the sold out world premiere in Austin. It’s shown at over 50 festivals to date, in over 20 countries, had a theatrical release in the UK and is about to release in a further two countries. This isn’t a self-congratulation fest, just a reminder, for me at the end of 2011 of what a jam-packed and unexpected, crazy year it’s been. It’s not bad for my micro-budget, ramshackle DIY film made originally as a side project. It’s confirmed my belief that it’s really worth pursuing projects you believe in and putting something out there. Not everyone will like it, but those that do are more than worth it. I’m so thank full for the support I’ve had, not least from DN and the 437 people that crowd funded the making and distribution of the film.

Anyway…

As a consequence of all this I’ve never been to more film festivals or cinemas but ironically never watched fewer films. The films I’ve wanted to see have invariably been on at the same time as my screenings – the ‘films that got away’ which I’m desperate to see included; Bombay Beach, The Interrupters, Beats Rhymes and Life, Hell and Back Again, Page One: Inside the New York Times, Give Up Tomorrow, We Need to Talk About Kevin
and Margaret.

So here is my top ten of the films that stayed with me in 2011, made an impact and looking back into the depths of a dense year still shine brightly. I have *slightly* broken the DN rules [MarBelle: Tut!] by including two art films that were only available to view in galleries but they are long form and both are brilliant, in fact so good I made one my film of the year.

10. Troll Hunter – André Øvredal
Trrrrrrroooooooollllll!

Read the DN review of Troll Hunter.

9. You’ve Been Trumped – Anthony Baxter
In 2010 I took part in The Edinburgh Pitch – pitching my film Orionto a panel of international commissioners. One of my fellow pitchers was Anthony Baxter with his feature documentary You’ve been Trumped.

The film tells the story of how American Millionaire Donald Trump ran rough shod over local resident’s wishes, in order to build a luxury golf course in a remote area of Scotland. The course is sited in a spot of exceptional natural beauty in Baxter’s hometown of Montrose. Trump is shown to bully local residents and quite literally bulldozes his way into their lives. Baxter documents it all including the protests, his own arrest and alleged corruption at Government level. It’s a classic David and Goliath tale that has been taking the festival circuit by storm picking up armfuls of awards and the unflattering portrayal has been credited with dislodging Trump’s presidential campaign. The film has certainly had international impact.

Back to Edinburgh 2010. Every commissioner on the panel turned this project down saying that the story had already been told (there had been a BBC special about the golf course development) therefore it wouldn’t be commissioned. Baxter continued on without funding and then crowd-funded his premiere at Hotdocs 2011. It’s confirmation for me of the film truism ‘nobody knows anything’. It was clear that there was a film there and a ready audience. Baxter has proved that and then some.

8. The Posters Came from the Walls – Nicolas Abrahams & Jeremy Deller
Another film about the relationship between a band and their fans, this time Depeche Mode fans “I am no-one without listening to music”, “We are Depeche-ist. Like Communist, like Fascist”.

Revel in ‘The day of Dave’, marching band versions of DM songs and how behind the Berlin wall it felt like DM emerged – “like the posters had come from the walls”. Ongoing wrangles with the record company mean that this won’t be on general release any time soon but look out for it – I saw it at a special screening in Brighton, part of Music Doc 11.

7. Justin Bieber: Never Say Never – Jon M. Chu
I’m not a fan of Beiber’s music but this justifiably has a place in my top 10 as the film is just so good. JB’s rag to riches ascent at the speed of lightening is a cracking tale. The combination of ambitious management, undeniable talent and a boy on the brink of adulthood trying to figure out who he is a heady mix. The concert footage is thrilling but what makes the film are the fans. Girl, after girl, after girl not much younger than JB heartbreakingly disclose why he is the one for them.

As a side note, I’ve seen some intense snobbery come out when it comes to this film. It was programmed at SheffDocFest this year by Hussain Churrimbhoy. There was much disdain expressed by some of the ‘social change’ programmers and foundations. I don’t understand why the story of this YouTube star who has become the biggest cultural phenomenon of his generation isn’t worthy of exploration – Because a subject is popular doesn’t mean that it isn’t worthy of serious examination while it’s happening, rather than with the respectability of time and nostalgia.

6. The Arbor – Clio Barnard
Another film that successfully straddles both documentary and fiction. Actors lip sync to documentary memories to tell the story of Andrea Dunbar, the playwright behind The Arbor and Rita Sue and Bob Too. It’s a disarming watch and plays like a punch to the guts. It jumped out of the cramped airplane screen I watched it on and had me sobbing into my pillow.

Read the DN review of The Arbor.

5. Weekend – Andrew Haigh
The most romantic film I saw this year shot in my adopted hometown of Nottingham. Nottingham has never looked so real/lovely and there is a great line about the “ugly gallery” for NG dwellers. I met the team behind the film at SXSW and waited with anticipation to see the film, hoping it would live up to the great reviews (“Is this the best gay film ever?”) and my hopes after following the release. It did. Innovatively shot using documentary techniques, long takes and no coverage to cut to. The film is romantic, heartfelt and bittersweet.

4. The Clock – Christian Marclay
If you haven’t, go and see this if you can. Shown in Nottingham as part of The British Art Show The Clock is a 24-hour artwork that collates what must be every clock ever shown onscreen in a film, ever. They are then inter-cut and interwoven at exactly the time that is showing onscreen. So if it’s 1.04 pm the clock on screen will say the same and the scene will invariably be someone having lunch. More than simply a gimmick, Marclay creates unexpected narratives that are addictive and stay with you long after the “wow” factor. I visited twice for an hour each time, I wished I been able to see it all. Just brilliant.

3. The Skin I Live In – Pedro Almodovar
Bonkers brilliance from Mr Almodovar. I can’t say much about this with out revealing huge spoilers but it had passion, great characters and a story that veered on the right side of hysterical. Huge, great close ups of faces, massive nudes – it looks amazing. A friend came out of the screening stating “it was the worst thing he’d ever seen” but I loved it. Almodovar is a continually bold filmmaker and I’d always take something bold over something tasteful or indifferent.

2. Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives – Apichatpong Weerasethakul
Uncle Boonmee is on death’s door and he invites ghosts from his past to join the dinner table and walk with the living. A contemporary, Thai ghost story that beautifully and poetically explores mortality, folklore, memory and the tiger in the undergrowth.

Read the DN review of Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives.

1. 5,000 Feet is the Best – Omer Fast
I visited Dublin for the first time this year showing SIO at The After Dark Festival. Wandering around the city on a rain sodden day I visited Dublin Contemporary staged in a rabbit warren of tiny, spartan rooms in a disused hospital. One room was a former lecture theatre showing a 60-minute film on a loop. I sat down without knowing what I was going to watch but stayed for the full hour absorbed by the film onscreen.

The film fuses fact, fiction, fantasy, close up aerial photography and documentary testimony to tell the impact and PTSD of one man, a remote drone operator based in the US with his target trained on Afghanistan; executing remotely, the near misses and the civilian deaths. An actor, in reconstructed interview scenes recalls repeatedly the symptoms of PTSD he denies having and documentary voiceover from the actual drone operator is juxtaposed with aerial images of the places he fired upon, the families he left and the bright lights of Las Vegas.

When I left I discovered I had been watching 5,000 Feet is the Best by Berlin based Israeli artist Omer Fast. This is a pattern I have repeated in galleries over the years. Watched a great film to discover it’s a work by Fast – The Casting and Nostalgia amongst others. His work is consistently haunting, thought provoking and reaches parts that many films made for cinema fail to. My fudged description doesn’t come close to doing it justice but do seek Omer Fast out.

View a sample from the film in the Online Preview section of Fast’s GB Agency page.

One of my favourite films of 2010 – A Slovakian short which I saw at Hot Docs – is now online.

Lobos wants to see the world differently so he looks at it upside down, like a bat. Made by Lobos’ nephew about his uncle and Great Aunt. Bonkers, wonderful and completely on it’s own.

The first and last records i bought:
First: Mississippi by Pussycat in 1976, at the age of 9 (still got it too!)
Last: Philophobia by Arab Strap – from Fopp a few days ago

The reason for funding this project is that I sincerely believe in the phrase ‘Use it or lose it’ and sadly this is what is not so slowly happening to many of our record shops.

At the risk of sounding clichéd, record shops were a place to hear new music, meet like-minded people who didn’t think you were mad and even
sometimes have the piss taken out of you by staff when you bought something a little naff – but that was OK.

Although I can and do find obscure and long wanted records on t’internet, there is still no better joy than going into a record shop, finding the recording that you’ve always wanted on vinyl, appreciating the artwork, the condition, the price and the anticipation of getting it home as quickly as possible to give it a damned good playing. MP3 is never gonna replace that!

The day I stop having these feelings is the day that I’m dead inside. There is no reason why life should take over these simple pleasures.

I look forward to the day when a new record shop opens rather than closes. Maybe it’ll be mine…

This article was written for and first appeared on Directors Notes.

It’s that time of year again and this year MarBelle has laid down some very strict ground rules. Only ten films (hard), in order of favour and only films made or released this year (positively mean). That means I can’t mention one of the best films I saw this year – Wake in Fright an Australian film from 1971 recently restored and re-released by the Australian film board. A desperate and edgy film about a bonded teacher who loses his way, his looks, his money and his hope over the course of a week or so in the deepest outback of Yabba Yabba. If I could I would be urge you to find it and watch it but I can’t, so I won’t.

So, I’m focusing on the last year’s film watching. I’ve been lucky enough to go to a number of festivals this year and am based at Broadway cinema in Nottingham so have seen most of these on the big screen. I haven’t seen as many films as I’d like – There’s always too much time spent meeting and pitching at festivals rather than film watching, but that’s the way of getting films made. I do think 2010 has provided some amazing films. I haven’t applied any science or stringent rules, just come up with a list of the films that looking back from the darkness of December made an impact and have stayed with me.

10. Let Your Feet Do the Talking – Stewart Copeland
Let Your Feet Do the Talking is a documentary from Tennessee filmmaker Stewart Copeland about Thomas Maupin, legendary buck dancer from Tullahoma Tennessee and his grandson Daniel who plays old time banjo music. It’s an intimate portrait of a man who is coming to the end of his life and actively making memories for him and his grandson, the film explores the space in-between them. Tender, moving and like all good documentaries a window into a place a world away from my life.

9. Trash Humpers – Harmony Korine
Minxy, nonsense, unwatchable, brilliant, disturbing and hilariousness from Harmony Korine. I have to come clean and tell you that I hated Gummo with a passion but there was something mercurial about this. Leo Scott who edited this told me that he spent weeks degrading the footage making the HD look like VHS and that pages of the treatment just said “half the audience will have left” “doesn’t make any sense”. I’m paraphrasing but in a world of story consultants, trailer doctors and massive committees making films it’s a breath of fresh air.

Listen to the DN interview with director Harmony Korine.

8. The Oath – Laura Poitras

Shockingly absent from the Oscar shortlist and one of my highlights of Hotdocs. An intense portrait of the man was (or wasn’t) Osama Bin Laden’s bodyguard. The most brilliant unreliable narrator onscreen for years with much of the story taking place in Abu Jandal’s taxi cab where he now drives in the Yemen.

7. Racing Dreams – Marshall Curry
I included Sacha Gervasi’s film Anvil in my last year’s selection along with his quote – “Films don’t have to be serious to be moving.“ I completely believe in this sentiment. As a “non-issue” filmmaker making documentaries within a world that at times feels saturated with campaigning films about huge issues it’s hard sometimes to feel that if you can reach an audience by looking at the human condition or “small stories”. Racing Dreams embodies this sentiment. It’s a classic set up for a doc – We follow three teenagers who race competitive go karts over a season. Who will win at the top of the league and who will earn a life changing deal with Nascar. So far, so predictable. It’s a skilfully told classic, tense tale of who wins the race. What makes the film so brilliant are the details of the three racers and their onscreen transformation. We see them fall in love, grow up and deal with their lives changing. heart breaking. I watched this at Big Sky and sobbed into my popcorn.

6. Arsy Versy – Miro Remo
A Slovakian short from Hot Docs. Lobos wants to see the world differently so he looks at it upside down, like a bat. Made by Lobos’ nephew about his uncle and Great Aunt. Bonkers, wonderful and completely on it’s own.

5. Dogtooth – Yorgos Lanthimos
This is the only film in my top ten I watched on DVD, on a train. I had to lower the screen when the full nudity started – and I realised it wasn’t exactly family viewing. A claustrophobic and intense fucked up family drama. Makes you look at cats in a whole new light and the plane crashes are wonderful.

Read the DN review of Dogtooth and listen to our interview with director Yorgos Lanthimos.

4. Last Train Home – Lixin Fan
I was a juror for the features competition at Big Sky back in February. I took it very seriously and didn’t read any reviews of the films ahead of judging, not a press release, not a press pack, not a sausage. In fact I watched them in a way that I would never see a film at a festival where one is absolutely bombarded with marketing material and killer strap lines. This was the film we unanimously awarded best film. It’s astonishing – I learnt more about China from following one family’s experiences of rural urban migration and the reality of sweatshops than a hundred news reports. It turned my heart inside out and made me think.

3. Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans – Werner Herzog
Nicolas Cage bristles as a drug and booze and gambling addled cop in Werner Herzog’s bonkers cop drama, complete with iguana hallucinations. Like Wake in Fright it just keeps on going wrong for him as he sinks deeper and deeper into oblivion. Cage gives the role what an apprentice contestant would call 110% and it made me remember why I loved him so much way back in Wild at Heart.

Read the DN review of Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans.

2. Lourdes – Jessica Hausner
Wheelchair bound Christine makes a life changing pilgrimage to Lourdes to visit the shrine of our lady. This is a brutal and tender film about hope, faith, love, and the power of miracles. It’s a mischievous, atmospheric and quiet charmer that had me absolutely hooked, falling in love and devastated by the personal isolation. If you haven’t, you MUST watch this film. Brilliant.

1. Marwencol – Jeff Malmberg
I finally saw Marwencol at Doc/Fest in November after hearing a lot about the film. It didn’t disappoint. Marwencol is a documentary about the fantasy world of Mark Hogancamp. After being brutally beaten Mark rebuilds his life by building Marwencol, a fantasy world inhabited by action men and Barbies at 1/6th scale. What I like so much about the film is that Mark’s story is so unusual, so organic and the film is made with massive empathy and understanding of his story. I love the homemade ingenuity of the world and the way the film keeps on taking you deeper. It’s not perfect, a bit too long and it’s certainly not for everyone – the man I was sat next to at Sheffield tutted and sighed throughout the film – but I loved it.

Honourable Mentions
Gasland – Josh Fox: We awarded Gasland Artistic Achievement at Big Sky in the features competition this year. Josh tells the devastating environmental disaster of natural Gas fracking through the fight to save the creek in his own garden. It’s just so well done.

I am love – Luca Guadagnino: I have a massive crush on Tilda Swinton and she is breathtaking in this film playing a Russian woman trapped in a wealthy Milanese family until a young beau comes along.

Enter the Void – Gaspar Noé: Watch this for the title sequence, which is immense then leave. My husband described it as “rolling down a hill made of breasts wearing a helmet of drugs” which I think pretty much sums it up. It looks great but the story is wafer thin, the acting a bit ropey and there were moments when I thought the lead character had come back as a moth flying uncontrolled into lights and neon.

Dishonourable Mention
Avatar – James Cameron: Baby’s first eco story, written in wax crayon on the back of an envelope. Visuals developed in a club chill out room circa Middlesbrough 1992 didn’t help either.

To the next generation, the idea of going to a shop to buy a recording will probably seem as bizarre as the idea of going to a red box to make a phone call does now. But with the loss of physical formats, I think you also lose an important part of the music experience. It’s all about flicking through racks of records or CDs, buying them, reading the sleeve on the way home, and then physically putting the record or CD on. This film represents a wonderful opportunity to catch a snapshot of record shops, and to show the role they play in their communities, bringing together music fans and giving them a chance to discover new music. I’d like to think that good record shops will survive in the long run by specialising and building up a community of regular customers, but I’ve seen so many shops close in the last ten years that I know we’ll lose many more in future. Even HMV is mainly a t-shirt and DVD shop now. A couple of years ago, I wrote a novel about the music business called University of Death and it seemed the industry was changing faster and taking more bizarre turns than I could invent for the story. The whole industry has struggled to adapt to changes in technology and increased competition from other entertainment products, and music retailers have suffered particularly badly. I hope that your film will inspire people to support their local record shops, and reassure record shop owners and customers that there are others out there like them.

the first and last records I bought:
First: Rat Rapping 7″ by Roland Rat.
Last: The last vinyl I bought was the America 12″ by Prince (the 22 minute remix).
I buy many more CDs than vinyl now. The last CD was The Orb/David Gilmour’s Metallic Spheres.