Festival Of Moving Image

The London World Film Festival in a Nutshell

Launched in UCL in 2006 the London World Film Festival (originally named Festival of the Moving Image) offers a space for the fusion of film theory and film-making in contemporary Britain. It showcases documentaries made by UCL students, by students at the International Film and TV School in Cuba and in Rio de Janeiro in Brazil during the summer, and it offers roundtable discussions on what’s going on in contemporary film, and Q&A sessions with the cream of today’s international film directors and film critics.

The LWFF Backstory

LWFF has been going from strength to strength, year on year since 2006. In 2007 the founder of the documentary genre in Latin America, the Argentine Fernando Birri, came to speak about film in Latin America. In 2008 Ken Loach came to present his film It’s a Free World, and Vanessa Redgrave came to present The Fever in which she had starred. In 2009 the director of Y tu mamá también (And Your Mother Too) and Children of Men, Alfonso Cuarón participated in a roundtable on his work. And in 2010 the Bloomsbury Theatre was bursting at the seams with an audience of 500+ to watch the UK premiere of Henrique Goldman’s Jean Charles which was about the shooting of Charles de Menezes by the police in Stockwell Tube Station in 2005.

LWFF 2011

The concept behind this year’s edition of LWFF is “glocal communities”. It will involve a focus on the ways in which the moving image interacts with human communities on a local, global and “glocal” level. It will focus on the ways in which “good” communities interact with “bad” communities in our society today, and it will interrogate how we draw the boundaries between them. It will focus on the ways in which film can create an engagement with local communities. In some of the student films to be screened at the festival we will witness the development of an ethnographic narrative about the everyday life of immigrant communities who inhabit the cultural caleidoscope of modern-day London. The films, in effect, translate the world of the identified immigrant community into English as well as into the language of documentary film, and have the aim of creating deeper mutual understanding between “indigenous” Londoners and “immigrant” Londoners. And the film-makers will invite the community to the Bloomsbury for the screening of the film which represents them, and elicit their response – thereby making sure that film is a two-way street rather than a top-down process.

LWFF 2011 will stay true to its essence – screening student films, interrogating the language of documentary, showcasing the work of high-profile film-makers. We celebrate the successes of student films which are central to this project: A vida no ritmo made at the Rio Film School in 2010 was screened at the Cannes festival, and two of the films made at the Cuban Film School have been picked up by international film festivals: Gentle Men was screened at the Northern Illinois University Film Festival in March 2011 and Crepúsculo at the London International Documentary Festival (18 May 2011).

City of God

10th Anniversary celebration and screening of cult film 'City of God' with special attendance and Q&A with actor Leandro Firmino (Ze Pequeno) in association with the Rio Film School and Embassy of Brazil.