Filmmaking competition between local clubs - October 2004This month’s meeting of Surrey Border Film & Video Makers was an annual event for which we invite four local clubs to bring along their best film of the year. We host the meeting and show the films. Then an invited judge declares which visiting club has shown the best film. This year the competitors were clubs from South Downs, Haywards Heath, Reading and Woking. The hall was packed in anticipation of a wonderful evening and we were not disappointed. The South Downs club provided the first film which was a murder mystery, all tangled up with a wife who was rehearsing a stage play which itself was a murder mystery. The neighbours, knowing a stage murder was being rehearsed, ignored the sounds of the real thing. The entertainment provided by this film was great without any of the distracting gore of modern television. The second film, from the Haywards Heath club, was called A Knight to Remember, and it certainly lived up to its title! It showed a courting couple with a mix of their real life dialogue together with a slightly misty voice-over expressing their innermost thoughts. It was brilliantly done and revealed the woman dreaming of her partner as a Knight in Armour while the man was thinking about his car being serviced! The result was a complete misinterpretation of what the other was saying – and it was provocative to contemplate how the same sort of situation could represent the cause of many real life tiffs. The Woking club’s film explored an idea about the after life. When the woman actress arrived in heaven, she was given a choice on with whom she would like to carry on married life. This provided an opportunity for wit and humour with a nice twist at the end. The South Downs club provided a superb film of a couple visiting a rich uncle in anticipation of persuading him to leave them his money. We enjoyed excellent acting, a lovely plot and a twist right in the final second of the film. After the judges declared Haywards Heath the winner the audience relaxed with a film made by a Surrey Border team. This was a ‘who-don-it’ with a helpful vicar’s wife apparently doing detective work and feeding tempting leads to the real detectives, or was it that she was leading them up the garden path?
|