Bristol Experimental Expanded Film (BEEF) is a film and sound collective supporting experimental practice in Bristol since 2015.

As part of BEEF’s ongoing commitment to DIY analogue film practices, we present a curated weekend of film screenings, performances, discussions, critical dialogue, and a workshop. 

The programme explores how DIY film labs and collectives support and stimulate new ways of thinking about cinema. It emphasises collective approaches to making and screening film, considers how shared equipment and resources, integrated models of analogue film production and presentation and also artist initiated publications play a crucial role in the ongoing experimental and artist film making ecosystem. Practices that emerge from artist run film labs push at the limits of the analogue film gauge and take time and care to acquire. This knowledge stimulates innovations in filmic language and formulates new aesthetic possibilities that this program will consider and demonstrate. 

The DIY film lab community is thriving internationally. This programme brings together laboratories and filmmakers from across the world, with contributors and guests from Brussels, Berlin, Aberystwyth, Australia, and Mumbai. The programme aims to inform, inspire, and connect artists, practitioners and audiences within the evolving landscape of experimental film and expanded cinema past, present, and future, both locally and internationally. Panel discussion and film screenings will tease out and demonstrate the ways in which DIY analogue film labs and artist initiated film screenings stimulate and support innovation.

PANEL DISCUSSION
Posing the question of how DIY analogue film labs and artist initiated film screenings stimulate and support innovation and new aesthetics in cinema, the panel will discuss approaches to collective film-making and screening, the sustainability of DIY film labs in the UK in the absence of any industrial processing facility and the role of universities in sustaining 16 mm film production.

Els Van Riel (Brussels Film Lab)
Kim Knowles (Labordy Ffilm Aber)
Andrew Vallance (Contact, Film Talks)
Alia Syed (film-maker, former London Film Makers cooperative)
collective-iz (expanded cinema events)

SCREENING: THE FILM CAMERA
This screening includes films in which innovation is reflected through the camerawork and through the film material by mixing different frame rates, bi-packing, multiple passes, exploring the limits of lenses and light, incorporating found footage and working with wrong film stocks.

Elliptic, 30’  Els Van Riel
Shedding, 4’ Vicky Smith
A Dream of Glass Bangles, 4’ Michaela Talwar; 
The Land at Night 14’ Diana Barrie & Richard Tuohy
Where Night Falls a Thud,  8’ Sophie Watzlawick
The Ripple Effect, 9’ Niyaz Saghari
Traction 3’ Jenny Baines
A Half Moon Needs a Dark Night, 5’ Karan Suri Talwar
Badluck Film: the Bread, 4’ Gérémy Lelièvre
The Watershed 7’ Alia Syed

For more information please visit: 

http://www.beefbristol.org/portfolio/doing-it-for-ourselves-film-labs-collectives/