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The First Light Movies blog has moved home, you can now find us at www.firstlightmoviesblog.wordpress.com

It's all happening in the South West!

First Light Movies at the Encounters Short Film Festival

First Light Movies are hosting an inspirational session for young budding filmmakers at this year's Encounters Short Film Festival in Bristol. The event features a question and answer session with Geoff Taylor who made a FLM film, 'My Grandma' (see below) when he was 18 and has now gone on to make two more films to much acclaim. Gotta be worth checking out!

48 hour filmmaking challenge in Exeter

As part of the Two Short Nights Film Festival, the Exeter Phoenix Arts and Media are challenging budding filmmakers to produce a 5 minute film in 48 hours. What can you do with 48 hours, a handful of mates and a budget big enough to keep you fuelled with coffee for a weekend?

Watch My Grandma made by Geoff Taylor and Devon filmmakers Smith and Watson


My Grandma from First Light Movies on Vimeo.

Bits and blogs (Nov 7)

Ctrl.Shift.Delete Filmmaking Competition

Ctrl.Shift.Delete are looking for young filmmakers aged between 16-25 to make a film that will provoke action in the following areas - HIV and Stigma, Gender and Power and War and Peace. They'll give you £4000 and partner you with star directors and musicians.....

Vote for the winners of the Guardian First Film Award

The Guardian have drawn up a shortlist of ten films and they want you to vote for the film which represented the best directing debut of the year.

Brits best at documentary?

This week (5-9 Nov) Sheffield Doc/Fest celebrates the art and business of making documentary film.

There's a fab article about the festival in The Independent (who are sponsoring the event), which also explores the state of documentary filmmaking in Britain. 'The greatest docu-show on earth' argues that Brits lead the field in documentary filmmaking but that funding is tricky to come by. Nick Broomfield says 'Today, the UK Film Council doesn't seem to think documentary is its responsibility....'

Here at FLM we distribute lottery funds on behalf of UKFC to facilitate young people's filmmaking and roughly a third of projects we fund are documentaries. But even if young people are making documentaries are they watching them? 'The greatest docu-show on earth' notes that 'according to a survey carried out for the BritDoc festival, 60 per cent of TV documentary viewers are aged 55 to 64...'

Check out a FLM documentary below, 'Personal Demons' created by 32 young people aged 12-18 from Rotherham.


Personal Demons from First Light Movies on Vimeo.