Drift Showcase in Magnificent Revolution’s Cycling Cinema

Saturday 3 May
6 - 9pm
The Pie Factory, Broad Street, Margate
Free
No booking required
Please come ready to cycle and power the films!

Watch the amazing short documentaries made as part of a workshop held in Margate in advance of the festival. People came from far and wide to Margate to take up the challenge of making a five-minute documentary on the theme of ‘Drift’ in only 6 weeks…from scratch, and with no budget. How did they get on?

Also showing:

A selection of ecological FourDocs from Channel 4’s online documentary channel, found at www.channel4.com/fourdocs

And:

Dante’s Inferno, (2007) – Directed by Sean Meredith, Written and Art Directed by Sandow Birk (US)

Sporting a hoodie and a hang-over from the previous night’s debauchery, Dante (voiced by Dermot Mulroney) wakes to find he is lost — physically and metaphorically — in a strange part of town. He asks the first guy he sees for some help: the ancient Roman poet Virgil (voiced by James Cromwell), wearing a mullet and what looks like a brown bathrobe. Having no one else to turn to, Dante’s quickly convinced that his only means for survival is to follow Virgil voyage down, down through the depths of Hell.

The pair cross into the underworld and there Virgil shows Dante the underbelly of the Inferno, which closely resembles the decayed landscape of modern urban life. Dante and Virgil’s chronicles are set against a familiar backdrop of used car lots, strip malls, gated communities, airport security checks, and the U.S. Capitol. Here, hot tubs simmer with sinners, and the river Styx is engorged with sewage swimmers.

Also familiar is the contemporary cast of presidents, politicians, popes and pop-culture icons sentenced to eternal suffering of the most cruel and unusual kind: heads sewn on backwards, bodies wrenched in half, never-ending blowjobs, dancing to techno for eternity, and last, but certainly not least, an inside look at Lucifer himself, from the point of view of a fondue-dunked human appetizer. Each creatively horrific penance suits the crime, and the soul who perpetrated it.

As Dante spirals through the nine circles of hell, he comes to understand the underworld’s merciless machinery of punishment, emerging a new man destined to change the course of his life. But not, of course, the brand of his beer.

Melding the seemingly disparate traditions of apocalyptic live-action graphic novel and charming Victoria-era toy theatre, Dante’s Inferno is a subversive, darkly satirical update of the original 14th century literary classic. Retold with the use of intricately hand-drawn paper puppets and miniature sets, and without the use of CGI effects, this unusual travelogue takes viewers on a tour of hell. And what we find there looks a lot like the modern world. A cautionary ecological tale for the modern age, using one of the world’s oldest stories and old-fashioned puppetry methods.


_{Drift shorts powered by the Cycling Cinema, Margate Rocks 08. Photography © Simon Welsford}