James Lees - Award winning filmmaker
Posted on October 26, 2007 - Filed Under Media, Photography, Video |
Fresh from winning the Prix UIP at Cork Film Festival, James Lees is stopping by to talk funding, festivals and all things short film (and to screen some of his work). Truly a rising star of arts and media in the region.”Recently James Lees has firmly established himself as one of the UK’s brightest new filmmaking talents collecting the Prix UIP Best European Short Film Award at the 52nd Corona Cork Film Festival and being nominated for the European Film Academy Short Film 2008 Award. The award was for ‘The Apology Line’ a 10 minute experimental documentary that has also been selected at film festivals worldwide.’The Apology Line’ is the most talked-about short documentary of the year: based around the creation of a real-life ‘apology line’ where members of the public can anonymously confess to absolutely anything, over the phone. Director James Lees came up with the idea after hearing about the original apology line project in New York, conceived by artist Allan Bridge. James took the concept and pitched a short doc/experimental hybrid film with the phoneline as the starting point. The finished film blends the real-life apologies of people from all over the UK with beautiful visuals picking out moments that might otherwise pass us by, given new meaning by the apologies which are sometimes funny, sometimes haunting, but always fascinating.There’s an edited version on YouTube.It also showed at the Raindance festival and there’s a MySpace which give a bit more info about how it was put together. On a more prosaic level, it was funded in part by Screen West Midland’s Digital Shorts program.
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