Weekly Meander #14: Festivals, films & Frank Cottrell-Boyce

Plus – do you wanna buy me a coffee?

Hello! Thanks for joining me on this weekly meander through my week just gone, with a focus on my working life - a way for me to document a time of professional transition as well as a little shot of motivation and accountability to keep me pushing on! Plus my recommendations of great Substack reads I've seen in the past week. If you're new and wondering who I am, check out this post. TLDR: I'm a documentary filmmaker in distribution with my debut feature doc and exploring new films/other work adventures, whilst navigating parenting & perimenopause. Some balls may be dropped!

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And so another holiday weekend rolls around. This second Bank Holiday in May always seems to catch me by surprise – the month barely seems to have started before it's already coming to an end.

Back in the day, at school, May was exam time and so it didn't have the happiest of associations (though as a teenager, for several years in a row I went to stay with my grandparents by myself, without my parents or brother, to revise in the May half term and I do have some wonderful memories from these trips¹).

But these days May is one of my favourite months – because it's the month of the Brighton Festival. And the Brighton Fringe, Brighton Spiegeltent & Artists Open House . There's honestly something cultural - in the very broadest sense - for absolutely every taste going on in this city in May each year.

I've mentioned a few events I've been to this year already – featuring Green politician Caroline Lucas and some Neolithic-inspired sound art – but this past week I really went all in, with two film events, a delightful, mostly non-verbal, children's theatre show and a huge interactive outdoor installation of string, in the shadow of the city's flamboyant Regency palace, the Brighton Pavilion.

100 Miles of String at the 2024 Brighton Festival

The two big screen events were both, in different ways, incredibly special. On Wednesday evening, I went to see '32 Sounds', a completely fascinating & unexpectedly moving exploration of sound, which made the shortlist for Best Documentary at this year's Oscars and really was unlike anything I've ever seen.

In the version I experienced (it exists in several different versions), it was narrated live and in person by the director Sam Green and featured a binaural audio mix that each audience member listened to mostly through special headphones, with occasional instructions to take them off and listen (or feel) the sound from the cinema's speakers.

Green describes it as a 'performance documentary':

“I just bumbled into this form of talking and showing things with live music, showing film clips,” he says. “People say like, ‘Oh, that’s a performance or a lecture.’ You can call it whatever you want — I think of it as expanded cinema, and I really like it.²

I’m hesitant to say too much more about it for fear of spoiling the experience, but suffice to say, this is a film to seek out - and if you get the chance to see it in a ‘live’ version, even more so. You honestly won’t regret it.

And on Monday night, another cinema treat, up in the balcony of Brighton (and probably England’s! ) best cinema, the Duke of Yorks, described by the festival thus:

In the 1930s the GPO film unit created a series of films that celebrated the day to day life of the United Kingdom. The most famous of these was Night Mail - Benjamin Britten and W H Auden‘s soaring hymn to the love and labour that goes into delivering our letters. These films were like mirrors held up to the nation. Brighton Festival has commissioned new films with the same mission - to see ourselves as we really are, at work and at play. And to celebrate the whole business of just getting on with life.

At this screening we will show the GPO films Night Mail and Spare Time, alongside some work from the Brighton film makers and a screen talk with a panel including Frank Cottrell-Boyce, David Shrigley and Kath Mattock.

One of the new films was about a tremendous place, not very far from where I live - the Brighton Table Tennis Club, which offers high level sport and inspiration to a truly diverse community including refugees, former prisoners, homeless people, those with disabilities and mental health struggles, looked after children and many more. It was absolutely joyous.

And to cap it all off, I got a retweet and reply from this year’s guest director of the festival, children’s author, and co-creator of the amazing London 2012 Olympic Opening Ceremony, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, who was on the panel that night. A true fan girl moment, that!

WORK WINS THIS WEEK

This was a very Substacky week for me, as I'll elaborate in a moment. This aside though, as well as the ongoing brain melt of chasing university finance departments for purchase order numbers and unpaid invoices (still as tedious as ever), I ticked off a few other bits and pieces:

1. Watched online screening & Q&A of nuclear colonialism documentary 'First We Bombed New Mexico'

I signed up for this as one of the new documentary shorts I'm in the early stages of thinking about is also set against the backdrop of nuclear colonialism in the southwestern states of the USA. It's an area I've been thinking about for a long time – my first ever nuclear short, back in 2007, looked at the impacts of uranium mining on the Navajo Nation. And one which stood out for its near total absence from last year's blockbuster Oppenheimer movie. I'm not the only one who thought so either – the excellent

Greg Mitchell

also picked it up in his immediate response to the film on his dedicated Substack

Oppenheimer and the Legacy of His Bomb

.

The film sets out the historical story of the largely indigenous communities of New Mexico whose lives have been blighted for decades by the impacts of the Trinity atomic bomb test. In particular it follows the efforts of campaigner Tina Cordova and the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Coalition, as they battle for compensation under the soon-to-expire federal Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA), from which New Mexico is excluded. I know there's another doc covering similar ground with major celebrities involved (Matthew Modine, Martin Sheen, Michael Douglas) that also came out last summer. I've not had the chance to watch that one, but in the meantime, this film does a good job, and probably on a much smaller budget!

2. Spoke to another documentary director/producer about my experiences producing & distributing ‘The Atom: A Love Affair’

A mutual friend hooked me up with a director working on a really important, international political/environmental feature doc who was keen to hear more about the nitty gritty of of my efforts to bring my film to fruition. As I've mentioned before, the independent documentary space is a pretty perilous and daunting space to operate in so I'm always happy to share my experiences and thoughts with my fellow documentary travellers. And she's a mum too – so it was great to connect in that regard as well (another member for my peer support group, perhaps).

3. Brainstormed life stories biz ideas

A slight cheat this one as it wasn’t while I was officially ‘working’ and was more of a happy accident. I'm the treasurer of my son’s school’s PTA – they were desperate! - and while I was getting up to date on the spreadsheets with another mum volunteer we started talking about some of my life stories business ideas. But it ended up being a very inspiring little brainstorm session for me. I think I might have even cracked the name! I'm aware I've been using my inability to settle on a definite name as a get-out for not getting on with building my website and creating my first offering. But maybe now I will finally bite the bullet and register a domain already!

4. Substack Milestones

And so to my Substack achievements. Apologies to everyone who's not into this level of Substack navel gazing, but these really DO feel like achievements and major moments in my journey on this platform so god dang it, I'm gonna set off some fireworks to celebrate.

I got 3 big things done this week. 'What were they?' I hear you ask in excited anticipation (OK, I can't actually hear you, but you're saying it right?!)

• I made a new logo for my publication...

• I wrote my About Page (comments extremely welcome)...

• And I TURNED ON PAID SUBSCRIPTIONS!

I wasn't really planning to turn this option on, but then I read this from

Mika

and I just decided to go for it. I explain more in the aforementioned About Page but essentially I’ve decided that whilst all my posts are free and I’ve got no current plans to put anything behind a paywall, nonetheless some people might still like to support my endeavours with a small contribution - until I achieve world domination with my new life stories business (!) my financial situation remains less than rosy, thanks to all the debt and years of unpaid work from my feature doc.

I’ve set paid subscriptions at the lowest monthly level of £3.50 a month, or £35 for a full year. Or for anyone who’d prefer to make a one-off contribution to support me you can just Buy me a Coffee.

I'm going into this with the same spirit of play and experimentation I've approached my whole Substack journey with so far - and there is absolutely zero expectation or obligation around any of this.

But I would of course be over the moon if anyone wants to come on board as a paid subscriber, whether you've been following my journey in the documentary trenches for a long time elsewhere or whether you've just found me here on Substack and have got some interest and enjoyment from my meandering musings so far.

All subscribers, free or paid, are SO welcome. And of course, if you do like it, maybe you can tell someone else you think might like it too.

WHAT I'M LOVING ON SUBSTACK THIS WEEK

No women at Cambridge! The 1897 protests, part 1

The 1897 protests, part 2

I was studying at one of the two remaining all-women colleges in Cambridge in 1998, when we ‘celebrated’ (not sure that’s quite the right word) the 50th anniversary of women finally gaining full membership of the university, in 1948. I remember hearing tales of students at Magdalene, the last college to go co-educational as recently as 1988, wearing black armbands and marching through town with a coffin to protest the decision to admit women.

These two articles shed fascinating, if depressing light, on a much earlier chapter in women’s struggle to gain parity at the university - and have whet my appetite for exploring the archives of the

Cambridge Ladies' Dining Society

. I particularly appreciated the close ups of the women in the photograph and the attempts to work out who they might be. Highly recommended.

Connection, Consistency, Community

As someone who took a *really* long time to make one film, I loved reading this post from Lindsay about how she and some other mum friends formed a band while their kids were tiny and several years on have now written and released their first album! It just shows that when you show up consistently over and over again, great things can happen. And do have a listen - the songs are gorgeous 💖

All the things I don't know the difference between

It’s

Annabel Port

- on Substack! I’ve been a fan of Annabel’s going back to the Pete & Geoff breakfast show on Virgin way way back when. And her evening show with Geoff Lloyd on Absolute Radio was the soundtrack to putting my first baby to sleep every evening - hard to believe that was ten years ago now. I’m delighted to find she’s just as Annabel as ever in written form. This post on all the things she doesn’t know the difference between is a cracker. Honestly, do you know the difference between a satsuma, clementine, mandarine, tangerine or easy peeler? Me either.

Proudly taking part in the Sparkle on Substack 24 essays club with Claire Venus – this is post number 8 😊

Watch my film on Netflix (in Europe) or Vimeo (everywhere else) - or see trailer, reviews & bonus content HERE

Find me on X /Twitter & at LinkedIn

Life stories website – coming soon...

1. Not least going to an afternoon movie screening of Terminator 2 one afternoon with my 70 year old Grandma who thrilled to all the Schwarzenegger action and promptly rented the original film on the way home from the cinema so we could watch it over a pizza that night – classic Gram!

2. https://consequence.net/2024/01/32-sounds-documentary-interview-sam-green/2/