Worcestershire Film Festival

Kidderminster Film Roadshow

Our event in Kidderminster was unique in our series of roadshows in that it took place in two venues. We held our cinema heritage project in St George’s Church and the film screenings and workshops at the Boars Head.  It was also a part of Kidderminster Arts Festival.

At the church, we had a steady stream of people coming in eager to talk about the cinemas of Kidderminster. There seems to be 5 that are known and sadly, many of them have been demolished. After recording lots of conversations, our volunteers joined us at our screenings.

At the Boars Head, we started with Simon running through the origins of the Film Festival and the projects that had been worked on since, including where we were with the Roadshows.  We then watched the first film created during filming at the Regal Cinema in Tenbury Wells on their reopening evening, followed by a couple of films shown at our Worcester and Redditch events.

Following on from this was a workshop around creating a web video series, delivered by Ben Lewis, Stacy Guiney and Myke Forte who all collaborated on a hip hop project called Cosmik Panda. As a group, we discussed how technology aids and restricts us by making us sometimes spend more time thinking about what we could do rather than what we should do. Ben spoke about making content that is scalable so it can be seen on a smartphone right up to a 50” television in HD.

Moving to the screenings, we watched two short documentaries from Dave Stokes which were wonderfully produced.  There were two horrors, one from Bazz Hancher and another from Rupert Milward. A curious tale called the Portwine Stain from Mick Foley and a couple of others.

We did suffer for numbers attending, reaching 20 at one point, but this might have been down to the Olympics running, having an impact on other events of the Arts Festival. However, this did not deter from some great networking between everyone and providing an opportunity to look at other work happening in Worcestershire.