Encounters anniversary year celebrated with Perpetual Cinema

The Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival will celebrate 20 years of showcasing the art of short film with a ‘Perpetual Cinema’ screening of a unique collection of 20 short films from the festival’s past.

The selection will include Esther May-Campbell’s BAFTA award winning September, a beautifully created and considered tale of magical realism. There will also be a chance to see John Smith’s Blight, a film that showcases Smith’s capacity for both the playful and the profound, alongside Katarzyna Klimkiewicz’s European Film Award winning Hanoi-Warszawaa compelling commentary on immigration and belonging.

Debbi Lander, Festival Director for Encounters Short Film and Animation Festival explains;

“The Encounters Retrospective is designed to look back on 20 years and sets an International benchmark for excellence and achievement in short film. Encounters with the future occur through understanding the past. This unique retrospective of 20 films is a gift of memory, a reflection on history - the era that saw the change from analogue to digital. The Perpetual Cinema presents the Encounters Retrospective uncurated and in no particular chronological or thematic order, representing quintessential short film. Not only do these films showcase the extraordinary rich creativity and inventiveness of the short film form, they also demonstrate the range and depth of subject matter that filmmakers explore through short film from forced illegal migration to reworked Shakespeare in multicultural London.”

Cinemagoers are invited to drop in at any point to festival venue The Watershed to see the films from 5pm – 8pm on Wednesday 17th and Thursday 18th and from 10am until 8pm on Saturday 20th and Sunday 21st.

The festival will also feature a retrospective edition of the annual festival programme, Late Lounge for those who like extreme, experimental and downright gory offerings. This 2014 deluxe edition revisits the crème de la crème of Late Lounge over 20 years of festival history on Thursday 18th September at 10pm, where lovers of the controversial will spend an evening celebrating films and topics others may shy away from.

For more information visit http://encounters-festival.org.uk/ or follow @EncountersSFF and https://www.facebook.com/pages/Encounters-Short-Film-Festival .

02 September 2014, by Laurence Boyce