London Eco Film Festival

a couple of years ago we launched the London Eco Film Festival, in London!  We focussed on young film makers from around the world and gave them an opportunity to showcase their work to a very appreciative London audience. Our film categories ranged from nature and conservation, development issues, human rights, special education needs, the environment and pertinent social issues including transvestites in Turkey.  Great fun!!We are planning a sequel event in the Autumn of 2019 and want to tie the event in with volunteer film efforts over the coming year. The Global film Institute is a loose network of ex pat film makers from a variety of countries who base themselves in Tenerife because it is always warm down there. These are very well known, experienced and talented individuals and they will be mentoring our young film makers. We have three projects planned for the coming year:

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Myanmar

Frank Kingdom Ward was one of the last of the great plant collectors, going on expeditions at the behest of the RHS. The ‘Blue Primrose’ was but one of the many plants he discovered in the foothills of the Himalayas and his book Burma’s Icy Mountain, of which I have a copy, documenting his journey is full of passion and excitement. His writing style is very enthused and you get a real sense of his excitement when, for example, on first setting his sight on a blue primrose; you get a real sense of actually being there.

As well as the extraordinary plant life and the tantalising hints of what he couldn’t see, in higher valleys, on the forest canopy for example, (we can deploy drones!?) he made vivid accounts of the Hill Tribe peoples he met on his journey, which started just north on Mandalay. We want to make a film based on his last expedition as witnessed by his book. This will be a botanical expedition led by students (our alumnus) at Bangor University and incorporating botanical illustration, photography, social anthropology and, of course.

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Vietnam

 in the village where we are based all teenage boys and girls have to go through a four week workshop where they learn to be a ‘good wife’ ‘good husband’- two separate programmes of course. We want to invite some Western teenagers to partake in the course alongside locals and make a film!

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Mali

Thirty years on. One of the film people, he who suggested the Global Film Institute as a name, is a seasoned BBC man with film projects globally under his belt. His first film project was to a remote rural village in Mali and he wants to go back there and meet the people he met then and record how their lives developed over the course of the last thirty years.

Angels can support any of these film projects and, as part of their ‘benefits’, accompany the teams in the field!

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