BFI NETWORK X Film Hub Midlands X The DocHub -
The UK Feature Documentary Landscape.
Tuesday 26 October 2021
7.30pm-8.30pm, Online
Join us for this BFI NETWORK X Film Hub Midlands X The DocHub online panel discussion where Ulrike Kubatta, Director of The DocHub will welcome a panel of feature documentary filmmakers from the midlands including Rubika Shah and Ed Gibbs of WHITE RIOT and Nick Hamer of OUTSIDE THE CITY to talk about their journey's from making shorts to feature documentary film.
We will discuss what makes a feature documentary stand out to distributors & exhibitors, looking at ways in which talent can build a track record and reputation to ensure that their work is noticed, looking at the current landscape for UK made documentary feature film.
Join us for insights and the chance to ask questions of the panel directly at our Q&A, and together we will explore the challenges, practicalities, and rewards for documentary makers in 2021 and beyond.
With BSL Interpretation
We will discuss what makes a feature documentary stand out to distributors & exhibitors, looking at ways in which talent can build a track record and reputation to ensure that their work is noticed, looking at the current landscape for UK made documentary feature film.
Join us for insights and the chance to ask questions of the panel directly at our Q&A, and together we will explore the challenges, practicalities, and rewards for documentary makers in 2021 and beyond.
With BSL Interpretation
The Documentaries.
Outside The City (2019) is an absorbing documentary about the monks of Mt St Bernard Abbey; a community of 25 men who are opening the first Trappist brewery in the UK. For their historic, counter cultural lifestyle to survive, the venture must succeed. As the monks reflect on spirituality, ageing and the end of life, the number of burials in the Abbey graveyard continue to grow.
Director Nick Hamer spent a year with the monks, gaining privileged access to document their hidden lives. They have turned their backs on the material, consumer society, to focus instead on contemplative spirituality, and to maintain an age-old religious tradition.
Outside the City won best documentary at the 2020 Midlands Movies Awards, was long listed for Best Documentary at BIFA 2020 and has been nominated for the 2019 Golden Castle at Off Cinema International Documentary Festival in Poland.
White Riot (2019) Rubika Shah’s award-winning and energising film charts a vital national protest movement. Rock Against Racism (RAR) was formed in 1976, prompted by ‘music’s biggest colonialist’ Eric Clapton and his support of racist MP Enoch Powell.
White Riot blends fresh interviews with queasy archive footage to recreate a hostile environment of anti-immigrant hysteria and National Front marches. As neo-Nazis recruited the nation’s youth, RAR’s multicultural punk and reggae gigs provided rallying points for resistance. As co-founder Red Saunders explains: ‘We peeled away the Union Jack to reveal the swastika’.
Director Nick Hamer spent a year with the monks, gaining privileged access to document their hidden lives. They have turned their backs on the material, consumer society, to focus instead on contemplative spirituality, and to maintain an age-old religious tradition.
Outside the City won best documentary at the 2020 Midlands Movies Awards, was long listed for Best Documentary at BIFA 2020 and has been nominated for the 2019 Golden Castle at Off Cinema International Documentary Festival in Poland.
White Riot (2019) Rubika Shah’s award-winning and energising film charts a vital national protest movement. Rock Against Racism (RAR) was formed in 1976, prompted by ‘music’s biggest colonialist’ Eric Clapton and his support of racist MP Enoch Powell.
White Riot blends fresh interviews with queasy archive footage to recreate a hostile environment of anti-immigrant hysteria and National Front marches. As neo-Nazis recruited the nation’s youth, RAR’s multicultural punk and reggae gigs provided rallying points for resistance. As co-founder Red Saunders explains: ‘We peeled away the Union Jack to reveal the swastika’.
Our Past Events.
PUSH (Frederick Gertten, Sweden/Canada/UK 2019)
Event Cancelled due to COVID-19
“Frederik Gertten’s lively, approachable documentary on the global housing crisis should leave audiences feeling engaged, enraged and with plenty to discuss afterwards”
-Allen Hunter, Screen International This event aims to create debate about our regional and UK wide housing issues and to inspire visions of alternative communities. Joining us for a post screening discussion are: Geraldine Dening, co-founder of ASH (Architects for Social Housing), Yoric Irving-Clarke (Policy and Practice Officer for the Chartered Institute of Housing) and Tim Morton (Founding member of SHOUT, the campaign for social housing, Leicester). |
The Documentary.
Despite the fact that housing is a fundamental human right and a precondition to a safe and healthy life, it is becoming almost impossible to find an affordable place to live in cities across the world.
Push is a film that sheds light on a new kind of faceless landlord, our increasingly unlivable cities and an escalating crisis that has an effect on us all. The film follows Leilani Farha, the UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing as she travels the globe, trying to understand who’s being pushed out of the city and why.
Push is a film that sheds light on a new kind of faceless landlord, our increasingly unlivable cities and an escalating crisis that has an effect on us all. The film follows Leilani Farha, the UN Special Rapporteur on Adequate Housing as she travels the globe, trying to understand who’s being pushed out of the city and why.
THE HARD STOP (George Amponsah, UK 2015)
Shown at: Phoenix Leicester (UK)
Date: 11th November, 2019
“Everbody wants to change the world, but nobody thinks of changing themselves.”
- Leo Tostoy This event brings together the documentary's director, producer and cast members with representatives of the Stephen Lawrence Research Centre and DMU's Professional Policing Programme to discuss the film's unique perspective on urban black youth, police brutality and institutional racism. The post-screening panel includes: Ulrike Kubatta (The DocHub@DMU, Chair), George Amponsah (Director), Dionne Walker (Producer), Marcus Knox-Hooke (Cast Member/Consultant), Kurtis Henville (Cast Member/Consultant), Lisa Palmer (Deputy Director, The Stephen Lawrence Research Centre) and Jim Holyoak (former Detective Superintendent, Leicestershire Police and Programme Leader in Professional Policing at De Montfort University). |
The Documentary.
In August 2011 29 year old Mark Duggan was shot and killed whilst being arrested by armed police in Tottenham. This incident ignited a riot that escalated into a week of the worst civil unrest in recent British history.
The Hard Stop is an observational documentary that follows the progress of two of Mark Duggan’s childhood friends over the course of 24 months as they deal with bereavement, imprisonment and unemployment whilst the journalistic debate about who exactly their friend Mark Duggan was and the judicial inquiry into his killing plaus out as a news story in the background.
The Hard Stop is an observational documentary that follows the progress of two of Mark Duggan’s childhood friends over the course of 24 months as they deal with bereavement, imprisonment and unemployment whilst the journalistic debate about who exactly their friend Mark Duggan was and the judicial inquiry into his killing plaus out as a news story in the background.
SHE SHOULD HAVE GONE TO THE MOON (Ulrike Kubatta, UK 2008)
Shown at: Phoenix Leicester (UK)
Date: 7th November, 2018
The DocHub presents the award-winning documentary She Should Have Gone To The Moon, followed by a discussion with Director Ulrike Kubatta, who will be joined by Dr Suzanne Imber, Associate Professor in Space Physics at the University of Leicester and winner of the 2017 BBC Two programme “Astronauts, Do You Have What It Takes?"
Drawing on the documentary's depiction of one woman's dream to conquer space in 1961 and Imber's recent experience of astronaut training, the event will discuss the struggles and challenges that women have faced in claiming their rightful place in space history. |
The Documentary.
She Should Have Gone To The Moon presents a uniquely personal chapter in the history of the Space Race. It tells the astonishing story of the pilot and pioneer, Jerri Truhill, who was trained in 1961 as part of NASA's top secret Mercury 13 programme, to become one of the First Lady Astronauts. The documentary is a lyrical journey propelled by childhood aspirations, shattered dreams and a lifelong battle against female stereotypes.
This is a film about Truhill's ambition to conquer the unknown and the filmmaker's fascination with a woman who dared to break down all barriers in aviation. Set against the historical backdrop of the Space Race, the documentary constructs an intimate portrait of Truhill and explores a unique chapter in American culture and society.
This is a film about Truhill's ambition to conquer the unknown and the filmmaker's fascination with a woman who dared to break down all barriers in aviation. Set against the historical backdrop of the Space Race, the documentary constructs an intimate portrait of Truhill and explores a unique chapter in American culture and society.