KESWICK FILM FESTIVAL 2006
Last weekend’s Keswick Film Festival was the most successful yet, organisers say, with audience numbers up almost 50% on last year and several sold-out events and screenings in the course of the four-day event. Top draw was American favourite ‘March Of the Penguins’, which packed The Alhambra Cinema to bursting on Sunday afternoon, while Swedish director Reza Bagher’s ‘Popular Music’ drew an enthusiastic crowd to the opening night gala and party at The Theatre By The Lake sponsored by Carr’s Milling Industries.
Most talked-about of all was the Festival’s ‘Nightwatch’ strand of late-night screenings, sponsored by Cumberland Ale and bringing to Cumbria the dark and dangerous side of world cinema. A youthful audience thronged to Festival venues for Hong Kong won-ton horror ‘Dumplings’ and controversial American improv comedy shocker ‘The Aristocrats’, bringing a new dimension of cinema to Cumbria.
Local film-makers starred throughout the weekend and on the final night when Cumbria Institute of Arts students Erik Petersson and Emil Engerdahl scooped the Festival’s Young Cumbrian Film-makers Prize with their short ‘Columbus’, a sensitive, technically sophisticated story of an isolated senior citizen and his pet goldfish. On the same night Carlisle-born Ben Holland was awarded the jury’s special commendation for ‘Heed My Words’, his imaginative, hilarious depiction of a traditional street shepherd dealing with pedestrian chaos in Kidderminster.
And the Festival’s education strand was more successful than ever, with 35 local children learning the secrets of stop-motion claymation at 3 Bears Animation’s Saturday workshops and young people from across Cumbria being taught film-making by Shoreline Films of Barrow.
With almost 3,000 paying customers from Cumbria and around Britain, 30 films in 3 venues, and four film-making workshops, this Festival was the biggest, best attended and most successful yet. Plans are already underway to make the 2007 Festival an even greater success, and details will be announced by the organising committee later in the year.
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