I was happy to be included in the 2019 Portobello Film Festival at the Gate Cinema in a programme titled: ‘EMOTION AND ECONOMICS – THE HISTORY OF THE GATE CINEMA, NOTTING HILL GATE.’
I made a film: ‘Room 1301’, in New York about 1965 with a friend, Yvette Nachmias. It is a 17 minute short exploring New York 1960s office environment, lobbies, corridors, skyscraper streets, lighting, elevators etc and based on her first experience of working in one. The loose structure is that you can’t deliver a parcel to Room 1301 because they don’t have any 13th floors in New York, they go from 12-14 without the 13! We made it on 16mm film stock that becomes a fire danger after 30 years, and Yvette transferred it to VHS and then DVD and it lost an awful lot of definition. Portobello Film Festival apparently still think it’s worth showing. Saturday 7th September 2019 from 1pm-3pm at the Gate, Notting Hill.
The Gate Cinema, as part of Portobello Film Festival 2019, screened a film programme about the history of the Gate Cinema and British film from 1911 to the present day. Actors performed short sketches that provided context and told a story of emotional creativity in the world of boom and bust capitalism. This monster mash up of films included silent shorts, extracts from the films of 1930s stars Robert Donat, Rainer Werner Fassbinder, and Derek Jarman, and included 3 premieres, introduced by their directors: Adam Ritchie, Jonathan Barnett, and Constantine Gras.
“Adam captured the first performances of Pink Floyd and the Velvet Underground, but is best known locally for his activism in the late 1960s that got community spaces under the Westway flyover handed over and run by the community.
Jonathan is the director of the PFF and has a body of VHS shot films that capture important local events and personalities.
Constantine Gras is a multi-media artist based in North Kensington, working on community art projects and has exhibited films at the PFF since 2010.
The last 3 films in the programme made by these directors are about the (anti) psychiatric guru R.D. Laing, a New York high rise drama and a portrait of the garden in the shadow of Grenfell Tower”
Ends with a Q&A session with film makers and Lee Ellwood, manager of the Gate Cinema.
Running time: 1 hour 45 mins.