Writer and Director: Costanza Quatriglio The Secret Drawer (Il segreto cassetto) is a documentary by Italian film director, Costanza Quatriglio about her father, Giuseppe Quatriglio, a well-known Sicilian journalist for Il Giornale di Sicilia, as well as being a photographer and writer. He will probably not be familiar to audiences outside Italy, however, and The Secret Drawer may well leave us wondering about his ultimate cultural significance. The film gives us snap shots of his frequent travels, his meeting with a host of film stars and the occasional world famous politican (there are glimpses of Churchill). But its five-part…
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Writers and Directors: Pablo D’Ambrosi, Giulia Innocenzi Giulia Innocenzi and Pablo D’Ambrosi’s Food for Profit is a raw documentary about the malpractice within the powerful Agrifood sector. Despite protocols designed to maintain both hygiene standards and humane treatment of factory farmed animals, the pair produce convincing evidence that powerful lobbyists within the industry, by ensuring EU subsidies go to intensive farms, make it possible for these farmers to ignore protocols and in some cases, to exploit migrant workers who are lured to work without contracts. D’Ambrosi uses hidden cameras to record disgraceful farming practices across Europe, while Innocenzi tackles workers…
Writers: Chloé Barreau, Marco Perez, Giulia Sbernini Director: Chloé Barreau This is a rather unusual offering. Showing within a weekend of Italian documentaries, it chronicles the love life of its director over thirty years. Contemporary interviews with twelve of her male and female ‘exes’ are intercut with camcorder footage of their younger selves. Across both timelines, the person who emerges as the true subject of the movie stays mostly, enigmatically, behind the camera. And crucially, in the present-day scenes, Chloé leaves the actual filming to others, enabling the interviewees to speak openly about her. What emerges is like a mixed…
Written by: William Shakespeare Performed by: Oddsocks Productions The quintessentially English phenomenon of Shakespeare in the park can often be ruined by the equally quintessential English phenomenon of bad weather. Thankfully, tonight’s performance of Julius Caesar by Oddsocks Productions at Brighton Open Air Theatre is blessed with balmy temperatures and blue skies. Of course, it takes more than good weather to make a good production, and Oddsocks, celebrating their 35th year of treading the boards of open air stages, clearly have a firm grasp of how to achieve such a thing. In what is one of Shakespeare’s most po-faced tragedies…
Writers: Leone Balduzzi, Giorgia Pedini and Nicole Salotti Director: Leone Balduzzi Sting Like a Bee presents itself as a documentary which takes as its subject the iconic little three-wheeled Italian truck known as the Ape (bee in English). It seems you can drive and indeed own an Ape from an early age and the film focuses on a group of youngsters who are proud owners of them. Writers Giorgia Pedini and Nicole Salotti, along with director Leone Balduzzi, claim that the film is doing something special: giving voice to the dreams of youngsters in a remote part of rural Italy.…
Writer: Duncan Kidd Director: Steve Small Every story of those who suffered, survived, and fought against the Third Reich is deserving of an audience and space. In these fretted times, tales of those standing up against the odds in the face of any threat of censorship (and worse) are a necessary rebuttal against the guttural noises which seem to be growing louder with every day. In a time where lies and ‘fake news’ go unchallenged, promoting the truth is the most powerful protest we have. The first commissioned production for Strange Town’s touring programme, as part of their three-year programme…
Writer and Director: Ben Petrie The Heirloom is a little gem of a movie. Ben Petrie, who writes and directs, stars as Eric alongside Grace Glowicki as Allie. They are a couple of earnest, early thirty-something suburbanites, given to solemnly explaining their feelings to one another. Eric is an as-yet unsuccessful film maker and the couple consciously perform their lives to one another as Eric photographs and films (comic) intimate moments. An early sequence shows Grace doing pole-dancing moves against a door jamb as Eric provides an improvised sound track. It’s a masterpiece of Woody Allenesque deadpan humour, Eric, with…
Writer and Director: Javier Horcajada Fontecha The first movie ever made ended with an act of violence- a gun being fired towards the viewer. The documentary From My Cold Dead Hands opens the same way- someone firing a gun with one hand and using the other to play the American national anthem on a trumpet. In this way writer/ director Javier Horcajada Fontecha establishes a connection which runs throughout the documentary between guns, America and stupidity. The title is a reference to a statement Charlton Heston made while acting as spokesperson for the National Rifle Association- “I’ll give you my…