The Creative Stars will be taking over one of the Cinemas at Cornerhouse and screening the films they want to see on Saturday 23 July to celebrate the start of the school holidays. There will be strictly no adults allowed!
Check out below Zack’s blog update to see how the planning and programming of the takeover is going for the Creative Stars team.
Another meeting for the Creative Stars! Last Thursday we finally decided on the films that we, the young artists, want to be shown on the yet-doesn’t-have a-title young person film festival. It was a struggle trying to pick movies that fit both Cornerhouse’s indie aesthetic and youngster ‘s interests. 15 of us were split into groups of 5 and nominated the films from both our ‘current’ and ‘retro’ film categories.
Last week we had whittled down a large number of possible films to our final five contenders; Attack the Block ,Green Lantern, Killing Bono, Incendies and X-Men: First Class. We have 2 Made-in-Britain Indies, 2 Blockbuster Comic heroes and 1 obscure Canadian Oscar nominated foreign picture. The procedure was to pick our top 2 films that we wanted to be screened and a back-up choice.
The 3 distinct genres made the selecting process interesting. You want to attract young people with the exciting big titles, yet if they are there for the special effects, Cornerhouse might not be their first place to go. As for a dark-themed French film Incendies, the subtitles could potentially bore a young audience within minutes. After the next round of voting Killing Bono became the ‘firm’ choice gaining the most votes from all the Creative Stars. Incendies and Green Lantern, came joint second and Attack the Block got enough votes to push it up into the ‘back-up’ group.
After another round of voting the previously popular Green Lantern got kicked off, this resulted in 3 low-budget indie pictures being our final choices for the new releases category; Attack the block, Killing Bono and Incendies.
Moving on to the ‘Retro’ film choice, we had to select 2 out of the 8 original ‘classics’ we had nominated in last weeks meeting. We had films such as, The Good, the Bad, The ugly; 2009’s huge success The Hangover, and old-times favourite Lion King in the mix, again resulting in a broad selection. However, this time things were easily resolved, The Shawshank Redemption and Ferris Buellers Day Off survived the vote hands down. Exit through the Gift Shop however wasn’t so lucky and received a miserable 0 votes in this round! This was probably due to the tough competition the old-school, all-time classics gave. Banksy obviously still needed some promoting among the Creative Stars.
Next week we will decide on the official title, and whether the films we picked are given the ‘ok’ by the Film Programme Team, to then be shown at Cornerhouse on our special Cinema 1 Takeover day on Saturday 23rd July!
Written by Creative Star, Zack Peng (May 2011)