Flying a Kite
- Streatham
- 1903
Petty party politics gets animated - literally - in this amateur cartoon with a message.
If you've got something to say, animation is a great medium to get your point across, even for an amateur. Derek Phillips made over 40 films in under a decade, taking on religion, politics, the environment and the art world. Constantly experimenting with technique, in this film he recreates binary politics through a red and blue design, with the characters reduced to simple mouthpieces and empty gestures - and with a typically pessimistic conclusion.
Animated satire on political speech making - despite an increasingly desperate call to intervene on poverty, two politicians spend all their time on party politics and disagreements.
Home movies are intimate catalogues of everyday life: birthdays and holidays, childhoods and neighbourhoods. Each reel is a private scrapbook - memories of cherished people, places and times committed to film. Rarely shared outside the family, home movies are the most intensely personal kind of filmmaking. They are by us, of us, for us. Victorian inventors put filmmaking gear in the hands of wealthy amateurs, but decade by decade, home moviemaking technology has become ever cheaper, simpler and more ubiquitous. Our home movies look much as they always have: in and out of focus, thumbs over the lens, wobbly framing, over-enthusiastic pans. But these flaws can't diminish their warm authenticity. Collectively, the nation's home movies make up a patchwork archive of British social life, of whims and ways, loves loved and lives lived.