Coffee-Table Notes

W hen Anthony Minghella died in 2008 aged fifty-four, he left behind a body of work that straddled film, theatre and television as a director, playwright and screen-writer. In Hollywood, he won the  Oscar for Best Director for his 1996 film The English Patient, for which he was also nominated for Best Adapted Screenplay. He followed this with nominations for The Talented Mr Ripley in 1999 and, as co-producer, was posthumously nominated for Best Picture for The Reader in 2008. This weekend, as part of the Made in Hull programme that forms part of Hull's year as UK City of Culture, Anthony Minghella – A Retrospective features screenings of Minghella's work and discussions with his collaborators.  Born on the Isle of Wight into an ice-cream selling family, after playing in bands, Minghella studied drama at the University of Hull, where he wrote an adaptation of Gabriel Josipovici's Mobius the Stripper. He also taught at Hull on Samuel Beckett and medieval theat...

This weekend as part of Hull Year as City of Culture 2017, Mind on the Run celebrates the work of composer Basil Kirchin through a series of concerts and film screenings that will feature artists including Will Gregory of Goldfrapp, St Etienne's Bob Stanley and Sean O'Hagen of the High Llamas. Basil Kirchin was a British composer who was described by Brian Eno as 'a founding father of ambient.  Having started out as a teenage drummer with his father Ivor Kirchin's Big Band, which also featured Harry South, composer of the theme to 1970s TV cop show The Sweeney, Kirchin toured Britain's dance hall circuit, including a year-long residency at Edinburgh's Fountainbridge Palais. Kirchin's own work straddled jazz, library music and more experimental explorations with musicians that included Led Zeppelin's Jimmy Page and free jazz saxophonist Evan Parker. Kirchin also composed a series of film soundtracks throughout the 1960s and 1970s.  These includ...

Duncan Nicoll is a film-maker from Dundee, whose short film Crowman premiered at the 2016 Edinburgh International Film Festival, and which has been screened at various film festivals around the world. Set in a brutal rural landscape following an unspecified disaster, Crowman focuses on the relationship between a father and son in a world that sees them as outcasts. The broodingly bleak dystopia depicted by Nicoll channels a very British form of future-shock which becomes a rite of passage in a fractured society that looks troublingly not too far from now.  First of all, can you tell me a bit about the background to Crowman and some of the thinking behind it? Like pretty much everything I've written, Crowman initially came from a single image - that of a man scraping up a dead crow from a country road and putting it in a bag. His son is there with him too. That was Crowman and Crowboy. I don't know where it came from, it just bubbled up from my subconscious, I suppose. A...

Graeme Maley's two feature films, Pale Star and A Reykjavik Porno , were premiered at Edinburgh International Film Festival in 2016. Both were filmed and produced in Iceland, where Maley also directs for theatre, dividing his time directing Scottish plays in Iceland and Icelandic plays in Scotland. Pale Star and A Reykjavik Porno were Icelandic/Scots co-productions. Born in Ayr, Maley trained as a theatre director in Edinburgh, where he became assistant director at the city''s Traverse Theatre. Maley also worked at Dundee Rep and Oran Mor in Glasgow, and directed Susannah York in Picasso's Women on the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Maley went on to run new writing based theatre company The New Works in Liverpool before decamping to Iceland. Pale Star and A Reykjavik Porno are Maley's first two feature films. First of all, could you just give a quick outline to your two films, Pale Star and A Reykjavik Porno, and what your thinking was behind them? Pale St...

Prologue –   In the Beginning There Was... They gave us five years. We said, “That's not a lot.” They said, “Five years. That's all you've got.” This is the first three, this is. A contrary, contradictory yarn about how an ironically named idea called Tartan Features became the – deep breaths and drum-rolls, please - Official-Advocate-of-New-and-Emerging-Talent-Within-the-Scottish-Film-Industry. Or... The not so secret origin of Tartan Features, how it grew up, got real and morphed into Year Zero Film-making.  Not all of it is true, but that's not the important bit. Except... 1.  It's Easy as ABC Except... “We had a vision...It was 2013 and we knew what the fuck was going on...The industry was a mess, and we could see the future...Like all the best pictures, the cavalry had arrived, just in the nick of time...Kick out the Jams, mother-fuckers...Let's go!” It started with a film called Sarah's Room, a full-length ...