Lourdes
The winners of the 6th annual Birds Eye View Film Festival have been announced in London by actresses Bonnie Wright (Harry Potter), Sally Hawkins (Happy Go Lucky, Submarine), and Patricia Hodge (‘Miranda’).
Amy Mole, Managing Director of Birds Eye View says: "This has been a brilliant year for women filmmakers not least with Kathryn Bigelow’s historical win at the Oscars which has really helped focus the international spotlight on the lack of women filmmakers within the industry.
"It’s certainly been another great year for The Birds Eye View Film Festival, underlining and celebrating the diversity and talent of women filmmakers from around the world.
"Susanne Bier inspired us all with her director's wisdom, the live specially commissioned music as part of the Sound and Silents Blonde Crazy retrospective at the BFI has been fantastic, the Q&A with Isabel Coixet was incredibly moving and Fashion Loves Film was more popular than ever this year."
Birds Eye View are proud to announce the following winners for this year’s Awards:
- Best Feature - Lourdes (dir. Jessica Hausner)
- Best Documentary - Junior (dir. Jenna Rosher)
- Best Short - The Door (dir. Juanita Wilson) & Slaves (dir. Hanna Heilborn and David Aronowitsch) - joint award
The jury for this year’s best feature, Clare Binns (Programming Director, City Screen), Louise Jury (Chief Arts Correspondent, London Evening Standard), Christine Langan, (Creative Director, BBC Films) and Jonathan Romney (Film Critic, The Independent) concluded Lourdes to be an accomplished beautifully paced feature about a woman’s religious pilgrimage to the French Catholic shrine; a difficult subject beautifully handled.
Birds Eye View are pleased to announce the launch of two training Lab’s this year, Reanimate in partnership with Warp Films and She Writes in partnership with the Script Factory, both are supported by Skillset.
The Labs are specialised intensive training programmes to hothouse new female writing talent and bring new feature films by women into production.
Reanimate is designed to champion exceptional female animation talent in the UK and to bring female led animation feature films to the big screen. She Writes is initially designed to address the remarkable statistic that under 12% of British films are currently written by women.
The women chosen to participate in She Writes are: Laura Anne Anderson, Rosy Barnes, Kate Bingham & Grace Banks, Tracy Brabin, Avril Evans, Sally El Hosaini, Rosanne Flynn, Oonagh Kearney, Rachel Tunnard.
The Labs, will take place over a year, during which time participants working on a feature screenplay will enjoy a residential retreat, attend specialist workshops, meet with mentors, gain a better understanding of the industry, have exclusive access to the Birds Eye View Film Festival, and workshop their projects with actors.
During the course of this festival it was announced that Rachel Millward, Director of the Birds Eye View Film Festival is one of the 50 'Women to Watch' in the creative and cultural sector as decided by the Cultural Leadership Programme and the Women to Watch Judging Panel.
Birds Eye View Film Festival is sponsored by the UK Film Council's Festivals Fund and Diversity team this year.
Support for the training strand is from Skillset and further support is provided by the National Lottery, Arts Council, the Commonwealth Foundation and the PRS Foundation.