An Evening With Docheads
- Posted: 1st Jan 2011
- Category: Articles
- Tags: short film, documentary
By Meghna Gupta
Networking is often synonymous with schmooze. Most seasoned producers wince at the thought of having to do it, let alone emerging filmmakers, for whom it can seem like a minefield. Instead of the feared schmooze, I got a sincere welcome and mince pie promptly handed to me at Docheads 9 as I entered in from a wintry Brick Lane. It is a fantastic idea put together by Katharine Round, Tristan Anderson and Andy Mundy Castle, and Fred Grace and Gemma Atkinson. This bi-monthly event provides a safe space for emerging documentary filmmakers to share ideas, ask questions and gain feedback in a way that may seem completely daunting at other events. Alongside the organic exchange that develops between peers, they screen short films by new and rising directors. Its lack of agenda means that there is a quality of freedom and freshness to the conversation, and has unsurprisingly given rise to collaborations between peers in the past.
First up on the screening list was Prayers For Peace by Dustin Grella. Like memory its qualities were blurry, smoky, made foggier by the pastels used. Distant and indistinct, the pastels constantly shape shifting, it played out the director’s ambivalence in identifying his late brother as a soldier and his own thoughts about the army.
I Won’t Go by Georgina Hurcombe was up next. About a fiercely independent, funny, yet isolated and elderly lady, this film goes back through Oli’s past to find what’s made her the person she is. This film demonstrates how epic a human lifetime can be and the number of stories that make up a person. Georgina made this from the time she was 18 at university, taking friends in tow to load up equipment and get to know Oli, previously her eccentric maths teacher.
Bye Bye Now by Ross Whittaker got people to tell all their intimate, momentous, racy and ridiculous stories making up the life of a telephone box. They reflect on that fact they’re soon to be extinct as they bring in but pennies. One man sums it up with a cheeky glint in his eye by surmising the fact that phone boxes are hardly the only thing losing money in rural Ireland.
To give an idea of what emerging talent is capable of, an early Docheads member’s film, Skateistan was screened - the only British short to make it to Sundance to date. Orlando Von Einsiedel made this impressively simple and visually powerful portrait of deprived kids in Afghanistan learning how to skateboard amidst their war-torn, neglected environment.
The best bit is that there’s no Q&A. You go upstairs after the screenings, and have a beer with the director or whoever you’d like to speak to and chat to your heart’s content. A brilliant opportunity to ask questions you’ve been too shy to, to really learn off your peers and to expose yourself to possibilities you might not have previously entertained.
Interested? Go to Docheads for further details.