East End Film Festival

The East End Film Festival is one of the UK’s biggest film festivals. In various venues across East London the festival annually "showcases hot new talent and homegrown films alongside larger independent releases and special events, informing and inspiring a new generation of filmmakers and audiences from across London and beyond, and raising the profile of this vibrant and diverse area - London’s East End." The festival also strives to actively search for “new voices from the edges of society, from different cultures, from strangers.” To this end, particular attention is paid to emergent British, Eastern European and Asian talent, and the festival screens features and hundreds of short films from up-and-coming filmmakers from around the world. The festival also places great emphasis on its MIND THE GAP sessions, which help "filmmakers in all stages of their careers cross the divide between an initial success and a sustainable career." New to the 2013 festival is a concerted focus on South American independent film. Also new to the 2013 festival is East End Live, a day-long mini music festival which will conclude this year’s festival. It will see over sixty acts perform in ten distinct locations across the East End.

This year’s festival will run from the 25th of June to the 10th of July, opening with a world premier of Mark Donne’s stimulating documentary The UK Gold, which boasts an "impressive soundtrack" composed by "politically active" singers Thom Yorke and Robert Del Naja. Born out of the issues raised by the Occupy movement, The UK Gold comes to evaluate the legacy a culture of tax avoidance and finance-centric politics will leave behind in the UK, with the 2011 England Riots and the 2012 Summer Olympics providing a highly polarised backdrop. This film will be the first offering ever screened at Troxy, an exciting new venue for the EEFF; a percentage of all ticket sales will also be donated to Enough Food for Everyone. The Festival will be closed by Rob Epstein’s and Jeffery Friedman’s Lovelace, a retro period drama and Hollywood film which demonstrates the potential for “bravery and invention” in any filmic field, something the EEFF believes in strongly. Focusing on cultural shifts and the downtrodden in times gone by, Lovelace speaks to the present with conviction.

These are just two highlights from a programme which will consist of a hundred shorts and eighty features, the festival's biggest offering of features to date; another landmark achievement involves the festival fielding its largest line-up of UK films yet.Time Out also underscored the Masonic Temple Screenings, "a day of secret-society-themed screenings at a real Masonic temple", as a highlight for the 2013 festival, whilst The London Evening Standard named Ashim Ahluwalia's Miss Lovely and Alejandro Fade's debut The Wild Ones as films well worth seeing. In total the festival will boast "16 world premieres, two European premieres, 28 UK premieres and 19 London premieres". And for the first time, the festival will also include an additional event: a music festival, East End Live, on the 13th of July. Over sixty up-and-coming bands are set to play at ten trendy venues across the East End. The ambitious steps the festival has taken this year prompted EEFF artistic director Alison Poltock to opine that, "the festival has undergone some seismic movements, but none more so than this year.”

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