Cornwall Film Festival 2004
"If this is what Cornish filmmaking is all about, let's have more of it". Mike Leigh
Children's Film Festival: The opening day kicked off with Creative Partnership's ‘New Shoots, New Routes’ showcasing young people's projects with Industry panel; Barbara Santi (film maker) Roger Williams (writer) and Mary Woodvine (Actor) doing Q and A's. ‘Screenbeats’ premiered a collection of music videos created by young people in various Cornish schools, culminating with a session by music video director, Neil
Coxhill.
Screenings: The festival featured premieres of Vera Drake followed by a packed Q and A session with the director, Mike Leigh and Yasmin by director, Kenny Glenaan. Local low budget feature premiere The Rabbit by
Mark Jenkin proved so popular that a second screening had to be arranged.
Evening screenings were extremely well attended, and included showings of Kaplan, an experimental music/ digital projection performance and the Roughcut 90 second film challenge. Other local films were represented in both Cornish Drama and Documentary sections and a digital screening room ran a rolling programme of over 60 films. The National Maritime Museum played host to a special screening of documentary Death on the Amazon, and a programme of films produced as part of the SW Screen's Digital Shorts. This year saw the introduction of a student film making showcase.
Skills Development: The popular hands-on element of the festival included a series of practical workshops at Falmouth College of Arts' Tremough Campus and forum sessions on ‘can the mass media save our language?’; Digital distribution; A production toolkit for film makers; DV Camera and stabilisation; Lighting design; Sound and DVD authoring workshops. Masterclasses included Film Pitching with film producer Michael Wiese and Writing for the Screen with Hollywood screenwriters Tim Harris (Trading Places, Brewster's Millions) and Will Davies (Twins, Johnny English).
Audience Awards: Another new innovation this year was the introduction of the Delabole Slate Audience Awards, voted for by audience members throughout the weekend. The Best Student film award went to DanJohnson for ‘Kung Fu Stu’. The audience award for the entire festival went to Will Coleman and Robin Kewell for their film ‘Chy an Dor’.
Govynn Kernewek: The Cornish Language film award now in its 2nd year for the best idea/pitch for a short film was another nail biting but very popular event. The award went to filmmakers Mathy Tremewan and Fran
Broadhurst for their film proposal De Sul. Last year's winners closed the Festival in style with their world premiere of Carl Grose's film; ‘Kernow's Kick Ass Kung Fu Kweens’. The event brought a bit of Hollywood Glam to the proceedings, with a red carpet entrance by the ‘stars’, bringing Falmouth traffic to a standstill with people queuing down the street to get into the theatre.
