Monday 2 May, Old Blue Last, 38 Great Eastern St, London EC2A 3ES, 2pm, free
As part of the East End Film Festival’s Secret Societies series, Electric Sheep presents a double bill of Alejandro Jodorowsky’s spiritual quest The Holy Mountain, a masterpiece of visionary and absurdist cinema, and Dario Argento’s gorgeously oppressive Suspiria, set in a sinister ballet academy run by a coven of witches. With special guests and cult film experts Kim Newman and Xavier Mendik.
The Holy Mountain screens at 2pm, Suspiria at 4.15pm.
Monday 2 May, Masonic Lodge, 40 Liverpool St, London EC2M 7QN, 6.25-8pm, free, but you need to book your seat
Electric Sheep will then move to the atmospheric confines of a Masonic Lodge for an evening of discussion about secret societies in cinema, including talks on Jack the Ripper and the Masons, witches’ covens as well as a panel discussion on religious cults in film. Speakers include Electric Sheep editor Virginie Sélavy, assistant editor Alex Fitch, Nollywood scholar Nicola Woodham, filmmaker and horror specialist Jennifer Eiss, and Jim Harper, author of Flowers From Hell: The Modern Japanese Horror Film.
Virginie Sélavy will host a discussion on secret societies on film in anticipation of the East End Film Festival’s themed day of screenings on May 2. With her guests, Strange Attractor Press editor Mark Pilkington and horror film expert Richard Bancroft, she will discuss the links between crime and the occult, looking at Jack the Ripper and the Masons theory among other things.
Electric Sheep will present a double bill of films and an evening of talks as part of the East End Film Festival’s ‘Secret Societies’ day on Monday 2 May. The East End Film Festival will screen From Hell, Dark Days and Brotherhood of the Wolf in a Masonic Lodge. More details soon!
With more and more people wanting to download movies off the internet, a new company has come along to help people do this legally with a wide range of films that includes British gems and cult classics. Alex Fitch talks to James Rowley-Ashwood about indiemoviesonline.com: they discuss how the collection of films on the site were curated – from Evil Aliens to the site’s one paying movie A Serbian Film, short films by Lotte Reiniger and the Brothers Quay and back catalogue titles from Peter Greenaway and Alex Cox, some of which are out of print on DVD – and how the site’s funding and distribution are achieved.
We are very excited to announce that our friends at the East End Film Festival will present a very special screening of Ken Russell’s The Devils (1971) at the Barbican on Sunday 1 May. Heavily cut by the studio and by the British censors on release, this provocative portrayal of witchcraft and possession in 17th-century France has now been restored and footage that was previously thought lost is included in this never-seen ‘director’s cut’. It is only the second official screening of the film in the UK and this chance to see Russell’s astonishing visions and Derek Jarman’s stylised sets on the big screen is not to be missed! Tickets available from the Barbican.
The EEFF will also screen Jerzy Kwalerowicz’s Mother Joan of the Angels (1964), a feverish exploration of sexual repression and religious fanaticism based on the same cases of possession in 1634 France dramatised in The Devils.
In addition, there are two late-night horror screenings: Julia’s Eyes, a Guillermo del Toro-produced chiller about a near-blind woman trying to solve the mystery of her sister’s death, and Agnosia, a retro-futurist thriller about a young woman suffering from a neuropsychological disorder that confuses her senses and who is being manipulated by two ruthless men.
We are especially looking forward to the Secret Societies day of screening in a beautiful and atmospheric Masonic Lodge on Monday 2 May. The films include From Hell, Dark Days and The Brotherhood of the Wolf, with more events to be announced shortly. In fact, we liked the idea so much that we’ve made ‘Secret Societies’ our theme for May, so look out for more on this!
The EEFF runs from 27 April to 2 May and this year’s tenth anniversary edition will open with an all-access documentary about The Libertines, There Are No Innocent Bystanders. Other highlights include the UK premiere of the new, digitally restored print of Taxi Driver introduced by Adrian Utley of Portishead, a special focus on the Romanian New Wave, a free outdoor screening in Spitalfields Market of silent 1925 Romanian drama Manasse with live accompaniment by Minima and a Bank Holiday bonanza of movie madness where hundreds of free screenings, projections, live music and events will be found in every nook and cranny of the East End…
Tickets are now on sale for all screenings and events here. For full programme information, please visit the EEFF Festival website.
Pumzi is a Kenyan science fiction short film written and directed by Wanuri Kahiu, set in Africa in the future, 35 years after ‘The Water War’. As communities live in underground compounds, scientist Asha is led to investigage the possibility of growing seeds in the seemingly dead world outside. Pumzi was screened at the 2010 Sundance Film Festival and we hope to be able to see it soon in the UK, the trailer really looks amazing! For more information go to the Pumzi website.
Electric Sheep‘s assistant editor Alex Fitch is curating a comics festival as part of the 10th Sci-Fi London Festival in April. He is also the presenter of Panel Borders, the UK’s only weekly broadcast radio show about comics, Thursdays on Resonance 104.4 FM.
The two-day comics festival will celebrate modern British comic creators from the last 30 years. The event will take place at the Apollo Piccadilly Cinema and at BFI Southbank and welcomes guests who have been published for over three decades plus newcomers to the medium.
Featured guests include: David Lloyd, Andy Diggle, V.V. Brown, China Mieville, Denise Mina, Ian Edginton and Yuri Kore as well as Electric Sheep-featured artists Hannah Berry and Karen Rubins.
Sci-Fi London has ensured there are a number of female guests on the comic book panels and members of the small press and manga community are well represented to ensure members of the audience can get advice from creators and professionals working their way into the industry.
Comics at Sci-Fi London takes place at the BFI Southbank on the May Bank Holiday weekend (30 April – 1 May 2011). There will be an additional panel at the Apollo Piccadilly cinema on 23 April about ’25 years of John Constantine: Hellblazer’: Andy Diggle and David Lloyd discuss the character from his first regular appearance in Swamp Thing #37 to the 250th issue of his own title, published last year.
At the BFI, panel discussions will include ‘Poe, Lovecraft and comics’, ‘Manga Jiman’, ‘Comics and moving pictures’ and City of Abacus. Hannah Berry will be previewing her new book Adamtime, the long awaited follow-up to the acclaimed Britten and Brülightly plus children’s workshops run by creators from Solipsistic Pop and a screening of 20 minutes of footage from the new film Warren Ellis: Captured Ghosts followed by a discussion of the writer’s work with some of his collaborators.
There will also be a handful of tables at the BFI for creators to sell and sign their work and Sci-Fi London will be inviting small press creators to take part in the festival for free.
Confirmed guests include:
David Allain (City of Abacus, music video director)
Martin Baker (Battle among the Stars)
Hannah Berry (Britten and Brülightly, Adamtine)
V.V. Brown (City of Abacus)
Paul Collicutt (Robot City Adventures)
Huw J. Davies (Freeman, Garth)
Andy Diggle (The Losers, Thunderbolts)
Alice Duke (Self Made Hero: Poe and Lovecraft anthologies)
Ian Edginton (Scarlet Traces, X-Force)
Ilya (Mammoth books of Best New Manga, Ballast)
Yuri Kore (The Boy Who Runs from the Sun, Manga Jiman Winner 2009/2010)
Zarina Liew (The Sun and the Moon, Manga Jiman Runner-up 2009/2010)
David Lloyd (V for Vendetta, Night Raven)
Roger Mason (2000AD, The Mice)
China Mieville (Kraken, Hellblazer)
Denise Mina (Hellblazer, A Sickness in the Family)
Edward Ross (Filmish, Parasites!)
John Spelling (City of Abacus)
Comics at Sci-Fi London is a Sci-Fi London Lab event, which encompasses talks with artists, writers, scientists, filmmakers and critics talking about science-fiction and science-fact.
Today Resonance 104.4fm transmits a prelude to the anti-cuts actions taking place on March 26. A huge explosion of class hatred and anger broadcasts from 8:00am – 5:30pm. Featuring contributions from W.A.G, Dan Hind, Sean Gittins, New Left Project, Ian Bone, Martin Wright, VOLANT, C’est Destin, Sven Kylie, William English, Anax Karphosporos, The Carrot Workers, Deptford Action Group For The Elderly, The Space Hi-Jackers, Tom Beastly, Virginie Selavy, Radical Schick, Ignes Fatui, Alice Bloch, Ukuncut, and many more.
From 5 to 5:30pm, Richard Thomas and Virginie Sélavy will talk about cinema and politics, including among other things a discussion of Jean-Luc Godard and Lettrist cinema.
To coincide with the Birds Eye View Film Festival’s focus on women in horror, Virginie Sélavy leads a discussion with three women filmmakers working in this traditionally male-dominated genre. Her guests are: Melanie Light, director of Switch, Kate Shenton, director of Bon Appetit, and Jennifer Eiss, co-director of Short Lease. All three shorts screened as part of the Horror Shorts programme of BEV on Saturday 12 March at the ICA.
This programme was first broadcast on Tuesday 8 March, 5-5:30pm, on Resonance 104.4 FM as part of their celebration of International Women’s Day.
Alex Fitch talks to director Ivo van Hove about his innovative theatrical production The Antonioni Project, which combines elements of cinema and theatre as it blends three screenplays by Michelangelo Antonioni with the latest technological achievements. The Antonioni Project is at the Barbican, London, from February 1 to 5.
In the first Electric Sheep Podcast of 2011, Alex Fitch presents a Q&A conducted by Jasper Sharp with director Tetsuaki Matsue recorded at the Zipangu festival at London University School of Oriental and African Studies, November 2010. The director discusses his work in independent documentary cinema, focusing on his two most recent films, Annyong Yumika (2009), a documentary portrait of the adult performer Yumika Hayashi following the discovery after her death of an obscure low-budget Korean oddity in which she starred, and Live Tape (2009), the one-guitar, one-camera, one-tape and one-take live concert film of Kenta Maeno’s street performance that won the 2009 ‘Japanese Eyes’ Best Picture Award at Tokyo International Film Festival.
Read reviews of Annyong Yumika and Live Tape in our report on the Zipangu Festival.
