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Film and Disability 2009 at Borderlines Film Festival
The DASh / Borderlines Film and Disability event goes from strength to strength.
2009 sees the Film and Disability event at Borderlines Film Festival spanning two days at two different venues.
Day one will be at the Courtyard Centre for the Arts, while day two will take place at the Ludlow Assembly Rooms.
The aims of the Film Fest were:
•To extend the film festival with a half day at Ludlow Assembly Rooms. This increased the geographical reach of the festival.
•To begin the development of a deaf audience, by inviting the Deaf Fest to present a selection of films by Deaf film makers at the Festival. Deaf Fest is the national deaf film festival held in November each year in Wolverhampton
•To begin the development of a visually impaired audience, by inviting Raina Haig, a nationally acclaimed visually impaired film maker to present her work at the film festival. We will be hoping to set up workshops etc with the RoyalNationalCollege for the Blind in Hereford.
•To develop the input by local, regional and national disabled film makers and disability groups
•To continue the development of the marketing of the film festival to as wide an audience as possible.
•To continue to ensure that the film festival is as accessible as possible
•To continue to show a feature length film made by either a disabled director and/or starring a leading disabled actor.
•To employ an evaluator/documentor to get personal feedback from the audience through one to one interviews
This was our fifth film and disability fest as part of the Borderlines Film Festival.
Due to funding from South Shropshire District Council and Shropshire County Council Equalities and Diversity fund, we were able to extend the Film Festival to have a half day event at Ludlow Assembly Rooms. This allowed us to draw on our Shropshire audience, who have been involved in DASh events in the past.
The big disappointment this year was the drop in audience numbers. This seemed to be due to a number of issues and events coinciding with the Film Fest, which affected our audience attendance i.e. The group from Hereford College of Art and Design had a drama week which clashed (this is a group of about 20 people), key people not able to bring their group, groups deciding to go to Wolverhampton Disability Film Festival and this was the first year we didn’t show the work of a local group (there were no films submitted by local groups) .
We are aware that Festivals have cycles, which can mean a drop in audience numbers and require the Festival to re evaluate its work and recreate the Festival. DASh has begun this process of re evaluation and have begun to plan for 2010 and beyond.
