The other panelists are Alex Orr, whose bonkers-sounding horror flick Blood Car is screening at the Festival, Mike Gubbins of Screen International, Mark Adams from the ICA and Eddy Leviten from the slightly scary Federation Against Copyright Theft, who should ensure that the discussion doesn’t end up being a big file-sharing love-in. So will I, in fact—despite the two terabytes of media obtained by questionable means currently littering my hard drives, I’m pretty ambivalent about, you know, nicking things people have worked hard to make.

If you’d like to come along, it’s at 6pm on Wednesday 25th June at the Traverse and costs a measly fiver.

In other EIFF news, vote for Hannah in The Herald Fashion Awards! Should she win, I will be demanding a credit for spending countless hours waiting for her outside the changing rooms of fashionable boutiques.

The film is one of many ‘quota quickies’, B-featurettes shown in cinemas, an unintended side-effect of the Cinematograph Film Act of 1927.

Director Harold Baim seems to have had a real suburballardian fascination for motorways, multi-storey car parks and tower blocks.

Discovered thanks to a wonderful documentary by Laurie Taylor, which just finished. (I’ll upload it tomorrow after it appears on Listen Again.)

Update: The good people at Speechification, an excellent weblog that posts highlights from Radio 4 and other ‘intelligent speech’ stations, have archived the documentary.

Just as The Stains’ career is taking off, Billy (a chubby Ray Winstone) and Corrine “Third Degree” Burns (Diane Lane) have the following exchange on their tour bus:

Billy: I like your hair.

Corrine: Yeah? What else do you like?

Billy: That’s it. I mean, at the moment, you’re just hair, aintcha? If you work hard, maybe, in a couple of years time, you might be something… different. At the moment, you’re just two white stripes.

Is that where the famous rock ‘n’ roll group got their name?

More details of the 2007 programme are available here. And, if you’re wondering how one makes an international film festival, here is a hint.

Nice work, Han!

The EIFF’s new Artistic Director, Hannah McGill, announced today that this year’s Festival, taking place from August 15-26, will have an overarching screenwriting theme – Cinema and the Written Word. The initiative is the first introduced by McGill who took over as Artistic Director following last year’s Festival.

The new theme arises in recognition of the increased international interest in the practice of screenwriting, and the rise to prominence of auteur screenwriters. Through panel events, master classes, workshops and discussions with filmmaker guests, the 61st EIFF will explore approaches to screenwriting and literary adaptation, relationships between screenwriters and directors, and the position of screenwriters within the international film industry.

“The screenwriting theme extends our enduring remit to look beyond the image on the screen in order to explore the structures and individuals who put it there and make it fascinating,” said McGill. “For me, it’s an intriguing shift that writers like Charlie Kaufman and Peter Morgan suddenly have more currency than some directors and that script development is such a focus of the international industry.”

1. No Wikipedia entry for Chimpy? I am shocked, shocked I tell you! Not shocked enough to write one, mind you.↩

Photo by STML

You’ll have to watch Eastenders in the coming months to find out, but, believe you me, the answer is a hairpin culturebend.

How about a Jarman retrospective next year, Han? You know you want to.

Increasingly, rare and avant-garde films are showing up on sites like these, best known for hosting homemade video spoofs. On YouTube, there are 1969 art videos by Nam June Paik, a 1967 student movie by George Lucas and an iconic 1930 film by Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí, as well as a clip of Dalí in a chocolate commercial.

It’s the latest reflection of an online culture where fans can function as curators of digital entertainment, bypassing libraries and museums with their own collections of music or movies. In many cases, these rare film clips are posted by amateur film buffs who’ve scooped up film reels or rare VHS tapes from eBay or local sales, and then digitized them for online viewing.

You can read the remainder of the piece here, and get stuck into the Grey Lodge’s picks of the best art, music and avant-garde video content here. For yet more arty cinema, check UbuWeb’s fabulous Film section.

Talking of art films, my review of Henry Coombes’ Laddy And The Lady—now showing at the Tramway—will run in tomorrow’s Herald. It is about an unruly dog at a pheasant shoot, with nods to Jean Renoir’s La Règle du Jeu¹, an odd undercurrent of sub-dom perversion, and a skew-whiff exploration of class. Highly recommended. (I’m not sure of the Herald’s policy on posting pieces written for them to the web—their online archive lives behind a paywall—but I’ve written about Coombes before.)

And (if you’ll excuse a tenuous segue) talking of Jean Renoir, his impressionist dad Pierre-Auguste’s The Painter’s Garden stopped me in my tracks at the newly-refurbished and wonderfully rehung Kelvingrove last week: don’t forget that the museum and gallery reopens in, at the time of writing, 1 day, 15 hrs, 36 mins and 35 seconds (ie, next Tuesday). Go see, it’ll knock your socks off.

Update: Looks like print versions are free, so here’s the review.

1. Thanks to top film lady H.J. McGill for pointing that out.↩