Screenlit Festival of Film, TV and Writing
Andrew Cooper introduces the first ever Screenlit Festival in Nottingham
Broadway Cinema in Nottingham is hosting its first ever ScreenLit Festival - dedicated to Film, TV and Writing - from 29 June to 5 July this year.
Conscious of the strong relationship which has long existed between writing and film in Nottingham - exemplified by Alan Sillitoe’s masterpieces on page and screen Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner – as well as the currently very strong colony of screen and other writers living and working in the city, Broadway very deliberately set out to create a Festival which privileges the role of writers in film and TV.
We hope writers will respond with enthusiasm to this long-overdue celebration of the importance of their role! Major highlights will include three days of exciting events featuring Paul Schrader, writer of the Scorsese masterpieces Taxi Driver and Raging Bull and writer-director of Mishima and American Gigolo.
Schrader will be resident at the Festival from Wednesday to Friday. He will deliver his celebrated screenwriting Master Class on Friday 3 July, introduce his new film Adam Resurrected on Wednesday 1 July and a screening of a brand new print of Mishima on 2 July, when he will also receive the first ScreenLit Lifetime Achievement Award in Screenwriting. Several of his finest films will be screened through the week.
Brilliant novelist Adam Thorpe will be reading from his new book Hodd, which he will discuss in interview with screenwriter Michael Eaton. The interview (on Tuesday 30 June) will be followed by two episodes from the 1950s TV Robin Hood series, selected by Thorpe and directed by none other than Lindsay Anderson. Afterwards Michael Eaton will introduce a screening of his own Robin Hood-themed film Fellow Traveller.
Lots of writers will be dropping in. Observer writer Lynn Barber will read from her acclaimed book An Education on Thursday 2 July; a Nick Hornby-adapted film version is due for an autumn release. Jimmy McGovern will introduce a special screening of his ground-breaking film, Hillsborough on Saturday 4 July. Miranda Seymour will read from her new book Chaplin’s Girl on Thursday 2 July while Frank Cottrell Boyce will introduce Millions, the Danny Boyle-directed film of Boyce’s children’s novel on Friday 3 July (already sold out).
The Festival will feature a number of events specifically by, about and for established and fledgling Screenwriters:
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Broadway will host the BAFTA Rocliffe New Writing Forum on Tuesday 30 June - for the first time outside London - chaired by Rocliffe Founder Farah Abushwesha and actor/director David Morrissey. The BAFTA Rocliffe Forum will be a major platform for new screen writing and a networking event for new and existing writers.
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A special BBC Writersroom Roadshow event with Kate Rowland on Friday 3 July and the Script Factory Training session: Truth and Fiction hosted by Rob Ritchie on Thursday 2 July are directly aimed at aspiring and emerging writers for film and TV. BBC Writersroom will present a special screening of Five Minutes of Heaven.
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Nottingham Writers Studio – boasting writers like Jon McGregor, Nicola Monaghan and Stephen Lowe – will present an event on Sunday 5th July entitled Show and Tell. Established NWS member writers Georgina Lock, Amanda Whittington and Graham Lester George will explore the varied routes writers’ original ideas take to reach the screen, using work written by them and produced in a number of formats, not necessarily all as originally conceived.
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A special Bang Shorts Programme (Saturday 4 July) will screen several locally-produced short films made by and about local legends, including Shane Meadows’ celebrated King of the Gypsies.
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James Harkin, Observer writer, social forecaster and Director of Talks at the ICA will be reading on Saturday 4 July from his recent book Cyburbia: the dangerous idea that’s changing how we live and who we are. He will illustrate how new technologies and computer games are affecting the processes of narrative creation in contemporary cinema and TV, with examples from The Wire, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and other key texts. The talk will be followed by a lively discussion, involving Harkin plus Margaret Robertson, editor of on-line computer game magazine Edge, Rob Yescombe, scriptwriter on games like Lara Croft and Haze, and Christine White, specialist in Narrative and Interactive Arts at Nottingham Trent University and author of the recently published Modes of Spectating. The Cyburbia event is being presented jointly with Game City and in association with Writers East Midlands.
Dr Sean Matthews of Nottingham University will give a talk on Friday 3 July entitled DH Lawrence, Cineaste?, specifically exploring the unanswerable question “if Lawrence were alive today, would he be writing for the screen?” but ranging widely around the great writer’s relationship with film. The talk will be followed by a rare screening of the Lawrence-inspired film Odour of Chrysanthemums (2002) directed by Mark Partridge.
Also on the Lawrence theme, and in tribute to director Jack Cardiff who died recently, the TEB Clarke/Gavin Lambert scripted film of Sons and Lovers (1960) will be shown on Thursday 2 July and Saturday 4 July.
The packed programme will also include lots of films on a variety of themes, including the opening and closing gala preview screenings of Coco Before Chanel written and directed by Anne Fontaine and starring Audrey Tautou (Monday 29 June) and Unmade Beds, written and directed by Alexis Dos Santos and largely shot in Nottingham (Sunday 5 July).
With special seasons around Adaptation - including screenings of Accident and Wallander: Sidetracked – the Red Riding Trilogy, and much much more, ScreenLit, under the direction of Linda Pariser, is destined to become a major new feature on the British festival landscape.
For more information go to www.broadway.org.uk/festival or call 0115 952 6611
ScreenLit has been made possible through generous funding from Greater Nottingham Partnership
Update: There will be a Guild event during the festival with Guy Hibbert in conversation with David Edgar on 3rd July.
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