Last year Forest Fringe began a new project – an improbable attempt to make our first feature film with a little knowledge and even less money, but with the involvement of the community of artists and friends that has grown around Forest Fringe over the course of the last decade or so.
This summer that project will reach fruition when, in partnership with ArtHouse Jersey, we will spend four weeks, across the end of August and the beginning of September, actually shooting that film on Jersey amongst coves and woodland and whatever else we can find to make use of.
Just as our prior work has relied upon a resourceful approach to location and equipment, so this film will be created in response to the site or sites we have access to and on finding innovative solutions to our technical and economic limitations. We will treat the conventions of narrative filmmaking – character, plot, structure – as a space to experiment in, in the same way in the past we have experimented with arts centres, night buses, music festivals, book publishing and more besides. At the same time we will open up the process of filmmaking, running our film set like a performance festival and thus enabling anyone who wants to observe and participate to do so.
The next, and perhaps most crucial step, towards realizing this plan is to actually come up with the story idea around which this film will be made. To that end we are inviting anyone and everyone to join us for a weekend-long ‘writer’s room’ at the Garret Centre in Bethnal Green, from 11am-5pm on 16 and 17 February.
If you are interested in coming along please RSVP by the following this link. There is a limited capacity for the event, so please only RSVP if you’re planning to come along and let us know when you do so whether you are planning to be there both days or only one of the two days.
Forest Fringe has always been a way to learn how to do things we have never done before, and to make things possible collectively that we would not be able to do on our own. We hope you can join us on this next journey into uncertainty and expectation.