Today’s MEN carries a very informative piece by Neil Keeling about Salford Film Festival.

Originally scheduled to go ahead as usual last November, organiser Stephen Kingston postponed it, hoped to secure funding by this month instead. But having found no one willing to stump up the £20,000 needed, he’s now axed the festival completely.

Previously £5,000 in lottery funding and sponsorship from a local property developer has covered the festival’s costs. But this time Kingston lays the blame firmly at the feet of the council:

The festival put the city on the map as much as last year’s World Cup triathlon event at the Quays did. The council spent £260,000 on staging the triathlon – we were asking for £20,000 to run a free festival for the people of Salford that would have been a glamorous showcase for local talent.

Kingston also points out that ‘the community is being used to entice the BBC to the Quays’. The Salford Film Festival previously took place at Red Cinema, directly adjacent to Mediacity.

Kingston’s name may ring a bell for Manchester media followers: he is editor of the free, independent Salford Star magazine. The community magazine, you may recall, was nominated for the Paul Foot Award for Investigative and Campaigning Journalism.

Following my post about Chorlton Film Institute, organiser Andy got in touch with the planned showings for early 2007:

Thursday 18th Jan 2007 – Sideways

Thursday 15th Feb 2007 – The Wind that Shakes the Barley

Thursday 15th March 2007 – Transamerica

All quality films. Remember: all screenings start at 8.30pm are held at St Clements Church, on the corner of St Clements Road and High Lane. The cost depends on how many people turn up.

Check the institute’s wiki to stay up-to-date.

Fancy watching arthouse films in unusual surroundings? If so, and you live in South Manchester, you should look up the Chorlton Film Institute.

Tonight at 8.30pm, for example, Woody Allen’s Mighty Aphrodite is being shown at St Clement’s Church on the corner of Edge Lane and St Clement’s Road.

The screening comes with a complimentary glass of mulled wine and no membership is required – just turn up and pay like at a conventional cinema.

Better still: the more people that turn up, the cheaper it is. As Livejournal user lapsus_0_calami says: ‘Last time (Rumblefish) it was £3.’

The Chorlton FI’s handy wiki website has been up since August. It includes three different definitions of so-called ‘guerilla cinema‘.

I’m a bit late writing about this, mainly because I only found out about it yesterday, but this weekend sees the launch of one of the city’s most interesting and underground festivals.

Put together by the Loiterers Resistance Movement and based at the Basement on Lever Street, this ‘psychogeography extravaganza’ began yesterday with the Manchester Radical History Tour.

Bill Jefferies guided the tour, which ended at the UHC collective, and introduced the OpenCity project. Later that night, the UHC-organised Garden City Social took place back at the Basement.

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