Guest Seminar - Rebekah Tolley Georgiou - Documentary Film

Rebekah Tolley - joined us for a Guest Seminar, 1.30pm - Thursday 10th December 2020

This seminar focussed on Documentary Film - aimed at Year 1 FdA Film but open to all year groups.
UCW Film students can access the recording of the meeting and see links from seminar here (or via meeting in Teams Calendar).

From 2006-2010 Rebekah Tolley was an Executive Producer/Director for UK super indie TV production company, Tinopolis. Responsible for concept development, creative and production input on wide variety of video and interactive projects for clients such as the United Nations, BBC and Channel 4. As an independent producer, she has worked on a variety of projects for BAFTA LA, BAFTA UK, Five TV and Oxford University.

Rebekah’s professional photographic work has been featured in The Guardian, Observer Magazine, Radio Times, AG Photographic, The Magazine (Santa Fe’s magazine for the arts) Annual Best of World Photography edition 2005, Photography magazine, BAFTA Academy magazine and BAFTA Annual Report 2005-06.

Rebekah is a MA graduate in Design & Digital Media/Media Arts from Coventry University (one of the oldest digital arts courses in Europe) and of the EAVE European Producers programme for 2011.

Rebekah began working with the celebrated Documentary Film maker Michael Grigsby during the making of his documentary, Rehearsals, in 2005. They later went on to make 'We Went to War', which revisits the stories of David, Dennis and Lamar - veterans of Vietnam war 40 years after their return, when Michael first filmed them for the award winning film, 'I WAS A SOLDIER'

Visit: http://poool.co.uk/rebekah-tolley

Some notes and links to Films Rebekah shown/ spoke about:

Michael Grigsby - BFI Wiki IMDB.

The Stones in the Park

The Beatles - Live at The Cavern

​Enginemen (1959) - Watch Enginemen - on BFI Player. This poetic Free Cinema documentary, filmed near Manchester, reflects on the changing world of the engineman.

Rebekah spoke about Michael’s mentor Lindsay Anderson and ‘Free Cinema’. Read More about ‘Free Cinema’ on Poool

​Tomorrow's Saturday (1962)

I was a soldier (1970)

We went to War (2012) - Michael Grigsby and Rebekah Tolley

Some notes from Michael Grigsby said in video interview- "Rightly or wrongly, I am known for making films with people with 'no voice' “.
“I learned about: 'Shutting up', 'Letting people be' , ‘No interuption’, ‘having no agenda’, ‘Silence, space in between is important’, ‘listen to their world’.

​Other Films Rebekah spoke about:

Okhwan's Mission Impossible - The story of a man on a bicycle, overcoming the borders of continents and body to reunite Korea. Bicycle road movie about a man and his epic 10 year journey around the world.

Life in a day - Kevin MacDonald / Ridley Scott

​Other notes:

Rebekah: “Always remain curious, be passionate, give people a voice”

​Also spoke about Iranian cinema including Directors Abbas Kiarostami and Jafar Panahi , speaking about his ‘This is not a Film’

Use of sound in Films, ‘Listen to their world’, ‘Don't load your films with music’.

Rebekah will be back in 2021 :)

Rebekah will be doing another session in New Year - aimed at Lens Based Media students - which will be more focussed on their Collaborative arts projects as Georgiou Tolley - https://www.artslabinternational.com/

Guest Seminar with Claire Clements (Friday 11am 24/3/20)

On Friday 24/4/20 we will be joined by Claire Clements - Live from Singapore! (on UCW Teams - please email richard.edkins@weston.ac.uk if you don’t receive/ would like an invite)

Claire is an award winning natural history Producer and Camera Operator from New Zealand, Australia and Ireland. Please take a look at her work on her website and think of some questions. Please post any questions you have here ahead of the talk 11am Friday 24/4/20. 

​'Over the last 9 years I've specialised in honing my skills as a story teller and shooter. I usually take my projects from development all the way through to delivery. 

I am a versatile camera operator skilled at long lens, macro and night filming. I've filmed on extended shoots around the world in often challenging conditions. I often specialise in telling urban wildlife stories. 

I'm a passionate conservationist and have a background in Zoology and a Masters in Natural History Film Making. 

​For my latest documentary I have spent 5 months tracking a  never before filmed primate in Asia. This will be the first time this species has ever been seen on TV. 

​I believe at the heart of every good film is good story telling and I constantly strive to find the magic, the beauty and the quirky that is so often right in front of us...and bring this to life on screen.'

https://www.claireclementsfilms.com/

Please take a look at Claire’s work, via her site, and think of some questions. Please post your questions in the chat section of this seminar, on Teams (access via calendar invite) preferably ahead of talk (i.e. before Thursday?)

We Are Many

We Are Many tells for the first time the remarkable story of the biggest protest in history, and how it changed the world: www.wearemany.com Eight years in the making, filmed in seven countries, and including interviews with John Le Carre, Damon Albarn, Brian Eno, Danny Glover, Mark Rylance, Richard Branson, Hans Blix and Ken Loach amongst others, it charts the birth and rise of the people power movements that are now sweeping the world, all through the prism of one extraordinary day.

Laura El Tantawy: In the Shadow of The Pyramids

Very Inspirational talk by Laura El Tantawy today at University Campus, Weston College.

Laura El-Tantawy is an Egyptian photographer. She was born in Worcestershire, England to Egyptian parents & grew up between Saudi Arabia, Egypt & the US. In 2002, she started her career as a newspaper photographer with the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel & Sarasota Herald- Tribune (USA). In 2006, she became freelance so she could focus on pursuing personal projects. She is a graduate of the University of Georgia in Athens, Georgia (USA) with dual degrees in journalism & political science.

Laura discussed her path into photography and her choice to focus on personal projects rather than assignment work. “It’s important for me to maintain my sense of independence as a photographer. There is more than one road to doing so and given the nature of the profession and the sheer number of photographers versus work, it is important to understand who you are and what your work represents amid this influx of imagery in order to find your place,” she says. Her talk focussed on her long-term project “In the Shadow of the Pyramids”, with pictures spanning 2005-2014 covering the political and social upheaval in Cairo’s streets along with her personal search for identity in a changing country. The book is being published by Dewi Lewis and due for release in late January 2015.

Visit her site below to see her work

In The Shadow of The Pyramid is Laura El-Tantawy's photography project of Egypt during the Arab Spring. "I am an Egyptian citizen. For the first time in my life I feel hope. The popular revolution of January 25, 2011 revived a long lost sense of pride & dignity for Egyptian people & its implications are reverberating across the Middle East.

Hindu scriptures say a person who commits suicide becomes part of the spirit world, wandering the earth until he/she would have normally died. Over the past 15 years, more than 250,000 farmers have committed suicide in India. Many had borrowed money through government lending schemes or private lenders to plant more efficient crops, but could not pay off their debts. Because of the extremely fast transition India has undergone — from a rural to an industrial, urban economy with an open market — farmers have been confronted by immense social and economic problems. This has especially impacted cotton farmers in the state of Maharashtra. “I’ll Die For You” explores the epidemic of farmer suicides using still photography, video and archival documents. The project takes as its focus the peculiar bond between man and land, a relationship unique to farmers given their reliance on the land for livelihood and the equal reliance of the land on farmers for survival. It's a relationship based on love, trust and nurturing and goes far beyond the customary attachment one has with his/her source of livelihood. This relationship is symbolically represented in close up pictures from farmer's skin juxtaposed against details from the landscape photographed in a way that attempts to blur the distinction between man and land to show in this environment the land and its inhabitants are one and the same: When one dies, so does the other. This short film is my window into film making. It is narrated by farmers who experienced the suicides first hand as it was imperative for me to attach a face and voice to this story - to humanize the issue and bring it to the attention of a global audience given the story remains largely under documented in the international media. copyright 2013 © Laura El-Tantawy / VII Photo Mentor Program

Black Friday's

I thought these images from different 'Black Friday's' made interesting Juxtapositions.

'A day once synonymous with fighting for social justice has been rebranded to being associated with fighting for large, flat panel TVs and energy hungry gadgets'...'Whoever named Black Friday failed history at school or was being bitterly ironic, as the precedents are bleak. You can pick between the chronic ‘Black Friday’ stock market crash of 1869, driven by gold speculators, or the brutal ‘Black Friday’ assaults by police on Suffragettes in 1910.' Andrew Simms  Onehundredmonths.org

Tesco, Eastville, Bristol 2014. The disagreement was just one of many which unfolded in Tesco stores across the country as shoppers desperately tried to get their hands on some of the Black Friday bargains. Read more

The photograph the government tried to hide. Suffragette Ada Wright collapses through police violence on Black Friday. 18/11/1910. London.
 

Autumn 1892 in Bristol saw a violent class war between employers, strike-breaking labour and police on one side and strikers and their mass of working class supporters on the other.

A woman urges people not to shop as she protests the death of 18-year-old Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri. Photograph: Jewel Samad/AFP/Getty Images
 

28th November 2014, UK: 'Police have been called to supermarkets across the UK amid crowd surges as people hunt for "Black Friday" offers.' BBC

28th November 2014 USA: 'For the past two nights protesters dismayed by the outcome of the Ferguson grand jury have taken their defiance to the streets of cities across the US'Ferguson activists direct anger at police brutality into Black Friday boycott. Campaign against consumer holiday crops up with modified slogans ‘Hands up don’t shop’ and ‘Don’t riot don’t buy' it’ Ed Pilkington Guardian

'Friday 18th November 1910) a suffragette deputation to the House of Commons met with a six hour onslaught of police brutality resulting in a the Suffragettes beginning a huge window smashing campaign in protest.' CounterFire

'Autumn 1892 in Bristol saw a violent class war between employers, strike-breaking labour and police on one side and strikers and their mass of working class supporters on the other. Picketing, mass marches and public meetings of thousands of ‘new’ industrial unionists were common, culminating in the use of military and police by the local state to break up a pre-Christmas lantern parade organised to collect money for strikers and their families. This event, which popularly became known as ‘Black Friday’, is an iconic moment in Bristol’s history exposing the relations of force between ‘owners’ and ‘workers’.' BRH