East End Film Festival

East End Film Festival 2010 Photo © Tanja Schimpl

Venice, Cannes, Montreal, East End. Now in its tenth year (22-30 April 2010), the East End Film Festival mark may not grace the front of film posters and DVD boxes around the world but this does not prevent it from being one of the most enjoyable events of the city’s cultural calendar.

Over 200 films were shown, offering a glimpse into lives as diverse as drug-fuelled mountain dancing in West Virginia (The Wild and Wonderful Whites of West Virginia) to the coming of age in a Laotian monastery (Today is Better than Two Tomorrows).

These films were beamed into venues the length and breadth of the East End, from Dalston to the Docklands. The sheer scale, ambition and energy of this year’s festival was colossal.

In addition to the bounty of films on offer, there were countless exhibitions, gigs, workshops, discussions and installations to add to the bazaar. The festival Filmmakers’ Centre was a hive of activity throughout, including the opportunity for budding auteurs to collaborate on the making of a short film in just three days.

Rummagers ascended into trinket heaven at ‘Give and Take’ – a plethora of free books, fabric, ukuleles, lamps and an assortment of miscellaneous memorabilia all brought along and given for free at Spitalfields Market. ‘East End Heritage’ generously gave people the opportunity to observe thirty years’ worth of East End photographic history whilst crawling around the bibulous confines of ten of the area’s oldest and characterful pubs.

Mindful of the election, a series of political films were showcased under the theme ‘Riot, Race and Rock & Roll’. Alan Miles’ ‘Who Shot the Sheriff?’ opens on the fervour surround the 1974 general elections where the National Front was polling near 10 per cent in Hackney. The walls of Shoreditch are daubed with ‘wogs out’ graffiti, Martin Webster’s growly promise of racial discrimination reverberates to the pumping sounds of Aswad’s ‘Warrior Charge’. The film charts the rise of the National Front, the Rock Against Racism grassroots movement and the subsequent battle for the soul of working class youth in Britain. The audience of the Vibe Bar on Brick Lane was audibly shocked as they watched incredible footage of the fierce battles, taking place mere decades ago, on the very streets that they walked on to come to the venue.

Activist and photographer Red Saunders screened a moving short documentary showing interviews with Holocaust survivors Leon Greenman and Esther Brunstein. The latter recalled how Nazi guards at Auschwitz told them “a few of you may survive, but nobody will believe what you have been through.” Through the spirit of independent cinema, these crucial tales can be given voice.

“I didn’t say that actors were cattle, I said that they should be treated like cattle.” And with that immortal aside from Hitchcock, there was perhaps no more appropriate venue for festival goers to be herded into than Spitalfields Market to watch his 1927 silent thriller The Lodger. Hundreds braved the chilly night to watch a crazed killer stalk the densely foggy streets of London accompanied by a suitably eerie live score from the quartet Minima. With few title cards in this film, the ambient melodies ideally complemented the rhythmic interlocking images on screen. To add to the mood of the era, boutique hairdressers Hair and Jerome were present with an arsenal of Do Rags, transforming spectators’ barnets into 1940s masterpieces.

A particular highlight was the screening of Rime of the Modern Mariner – journalist Mark Donne’s documentary ode to the Docklands at the inspired setting of St. Anne’s Church in Limehouse. Using the folklore and grand history of the area as a starting point, the film charts the decline of the once largest port in the world and the culture sinking with it. Featuring interviews with the ‘last Dockers’, the film is interlaced with impressive tracking shots and time-lapse photography and even takes to the ocean to film on board a modern shipping container bound for Africa. Surrounded by the soaring baroque splendour of St Anne’s, it was a fascinating insight into a crucial part of East London’s history. Steven Berkoff (born in Stepney) even turned up to introduce it.

The EEFF was looking further east this year with a wealth of Eastern European cinema. In Morfiy, we were taken to nineteenth century Siberia for a Bulgakovian tragedy and in Ya we were shown a nihilistic portrait of life in a psychiatric ward. Outside a screening of Crush, a collection of Russian new wave shorts, I asked festival goer Irena about the grim undertones. “In Russia, our famous authors are people like Bulgakov and Dostoyevsky – very analytical and not so light.” One short in Crush follows a seafood restaurant worker in a shrimp costume traversing Moscow receiving numerous beatings due to his advertising technique of kissing everybody on the lips. “Very Moscow,” she explained, “with the violence and the allergic reaction to forced capitalism. But if you look closely, the theme of the film is love! We watch a lot of British television so we share this certain dark humour.”

Przemek and Benita, originally from Poland now living in Barking were pleased that the EEFF gave them the opportunity to watch cinema from their native country. “You can buy food from a Polish supermarket but it is not so easy to see a film. In the six years we’ve been living here I don’t think I’ve seen one.”

There is certainly something peculiar to East London that encourages such an event to take place. Sentiments echoed by Fyzal Boulifa, writer and director of Whore (the winner of Best Short Film prize) who shot parts of his film around Clapton. “It’s encouraging to see people around here trying different things, peculiar things, and willing to collaborate, compared to other parts of London that are so impersonal. I lived in South London before I moved here and now my experience of the city is totally different. At this stage of my life, I wouldn’t live anywhere else.”

The East End has always been a crucible of transformation and it was a pleasure to attend the festival cocooned in the area’s most colourful haunts, surrounded by the town’s most vivacious creatures. Immortal, and ever changing.