Community Focus Group for Film Selection

We have begun the initial selection process for choosing the films to screen at the festival. These shortlisted films will soon be shown to a focus group made up of various members of the community in order for us to hear their thoughts and feedback before we finalise the selection. If you would like to become a member of the focus group please contact us using the details on the right hand side - we welcome all thoughts and ideas about the festival.

The three main criteria which we have used to select the films are as follows:

1. The film explores the rural landscape of Britain which makes us look at it in a thoughtful way.

2. If the film is from another country, it will make a distinct comparison with the British landscape in order for us to look at own landscape in a new way.

3. The film is suitable for an audience from a wide section of the community.

We these criteria in mind below you can see some of the films the next focus group will be discussing:

Sleep Furiously by Gideon Koppel

Winner of the Environment is the Quality of Life Prize at the 2008 Locarno International Film Festival.

This delicate film by Gideon Koppel is a love-letter to Trefeurig, the Welsh farming community in Ceredigion where he grew up, and where his parents found refuge from Nazi Germany during the second world war. It is a rural society at one with a landscape of stunning beauty, but in fact in crisis. Koppel's film takes as its starting point the closure of the local school, a definitive, calamitous loss for a place where shops and bus services have already vanished. The movie pays tribute to the grit of a people who may yet revive their economy, but it acknowledges a darker possibility, for which the sentimental note of an "elegy" is not appropriate. Slowly, but surely, Trefeurig appears to be dying, and Koppel's camera captures the consequent ripples of loss and regret.

Portrait of Ga by Margaret Tait

'My mother lives in the windy Orkney Isles. It's certainly a wonderful place to be brought up in' is the opening to this classic short film. It's a beautiful portrait of the filmmakers elderly mother but also a portrait of her beloved Orkney Islands in the 1950's. Margaret once said of her films, with characteristic modesty, that they are born of 'of sheer wonder and astonishment at how much can be seen in any place that you choose...if you really look'.

This film has been selected to show in the Scottish Landscape section of the festival when local conservationist Bill Shaw will deliver a talk about his summer on St Kilda which will introduce the magnificent film, The Edge of The World (see below).

The Edge of the World by Michael Powell

Powell based his script on the true story of the evacuation of thirty-six people from St. Kilda, an island ten miles off the west coast of Scotland, on 29 August 1930. The film was made over four months during the summer of 1936 on the island of Foula, in the Shetland Isles. Permission was denied to film on St. Kilda, which is in the Hebrides, and where they actually speak Gaelic, while on Foula they speak Norse. Powell was adamant that local people be in the film, and that it all be shot on location (which, except for some pick-up shots back at the studio, turned out to be the case).