DocFilm Festival in Leicester 1
As I mentioned yesterday, the Phoenix Square Film & Digital Media Centre hosted the first DocFilm Festival in Leicester today and, as I write this, it’s still happening until 11.30 pm with live music! It was organised by my friend John Coster and Citizens Eye, and I was pleased to be involved in a very small way – I helped to put up posters! It was an energising day; creatively, culturally, socially and physically (I cycled there and back).
The Phoenix Centre is an excellent venue for events such as this, one large and one medium sized cinemas, a more compact film room and many other user-friendly rooms. A variety of documentary films were on show during the day, from shorts (some less than 10 minutes) through to full-length features. The main film I saw was A Crude Awakening: The Oil Crash which presented a stark vision of the world as we run out of cheap oil.
The first short I watched was entitled Leicester Diversity, something I’ve experienced first hand since moving here. Leicester is a wonderful place to live, and a wide range of national statistics back this up. A Zimbabwean political refugee described how he escaped Mugabe’s regime, arrived in London and eventually settled in Leicester. He described it as the quietest (?) and best place he’d lived. Manjula Sood praised Leicester’s diversity and encouraged communities to believe in themselves and celebrate their different cultures.
This was followed by a film that expressed hope for people with a disability through a beautiful song. The basic message was that the main character was born on a different side of life, but he felt the same as anyone else! Stars reach out and tell us there’s always one escape. We made our lives on wasteland, as through the barricades. The film ended with him finding love and fulfilment in life.
A documentary about life on a Leicester estate since 1945 followed. It showed the effects of economic policies and trends on family life over those years, and the focus was particularly on the Thatcher years and the resultant poverty and despair. The next film was more uplifting, and it was good to have the film-makers, fathers and children featured in the audience. It presented very positive role-models for fathers and their children, and I found it refreshing.
