London Bridge pub crawl and short film festival

"Lose the winter blues with 10 days of noise and pictures" - the motto of the London short film festival instantly attracted my attention when Stefan sent me the link last week.

The last film festival I attended was some years ago, so I thought it couldn't hurt to go for the shorts again. The festival offers many different themed evenings on different themes, but we agreed on watching the documentary special, which took place on Tuesday. It was divided in two parts, the first one being an international special, the second one Britain-centred and from a more "personal perspective", what ever that was supposed to mean for a documentary. In spite of watching both with a total runtime of 200 minutes we chose to get tickets for the second part only and go for a pint first.

Of course, it didn't remain one. It's really impressive how many nice pubs there are to be found in this city and London Bridge area is of course no exception from this. We first stayed in a small one which was quite full already at six o'clock, so we only got bar stools. The good thing about it was however, that they were located right in front of the open fireplace, so we could take a look at the flames and warm ourselves while talking and of drinking ale. The second one was a bit bigger, brighter and stylisher and I forgot the name, although it had a very particular atmosphere, although a bit posh maybe. There was a staircase leading up to a gallery where you could sit and and take a sip, what we did.

So was there something more I wanted to write about? Ah, yes. The film festival! It took place in another nice venue, a small pub with two areas divided by a heavy brocade curtain. On the one side there was the "bar" area, on the other side the cinema, where the movies were shown.

The short films differed a bit in greatness, although most were quite good. The start was a bit unlucky with a 20-min-feature about people who restore old boats, but after that it got better with a non-documentary (some scenes were actually played by actors) which evolved around family members of prisoners. Another one told the stories of "good souls" in a poor area. The rest were about a woman who was into extreme sports and held her own wake before she was actually dead and two documentaries about buildings, one of which showed different personal viewpoints on a concrete "brutalist" living complex to be demolished soon. The other one an withered ruin on the Scottish coast which is used as a sort of gallery by a group of artists.

All in all, most movies were interesting and well-produced, although some did not earn the name "short movie" really. However, for the entry of 5 GBP it was a fun night and I'm thinking of visiting the ending celebrations on Sunday for another round of short movie pleasure :)

Links:
Shorts festival http://2011.shortfilms.org.uk/
The pub with the fireplace ;) http://www.lordclyde.com/index.php