Rebecca Moore speaks to Nosheen Khwaja and Cloudberry MacLean, the co-founders of Glasgow-based film collective Digital Desperados ahead of their special festival later this month.
Ashes
Firstly, tell us a bit about Digital Desperados.
We run free film courses for women of colour and free film screenings of films by or about people of colour that are open to all. Now we’re very excited to be running our first film festival called GLITCH. It’s on from 19 -28 march at the CCA in Glasgow. We’re fortunate to be supported in this by Awards for All, Film Hub Scotland, Ankur Arts and the CCA.
We are an anti-racist arts project. We focus on empowering the creativity of women of colour through the medium of film and creating an international platform for film and video art made by people of colour. The course is a really unique project that supports the artistic development of women by giving them a focused and supportive environment to develop both their technical skills and deepen their understanding of their own practice.
GLITCH’s programming focuses on films by or about Queer/ Trans/ Intersex and people of colour. Why have you chosen to focus on this demographic within the context of a film festival?
We’re the main organisers of Digital Desperados and are queer ourselves. We’ve always organically included films created by queer people of colour in both our previous programming and the course. To step this up to the level of making an entire film festival with this focus feels like a powerful and joyous statement. We’ve had great fun at DIY queer events in the past and wanted to bring some of that back. Via this focus, we simultaneously challenge racism (in general and specifically the exclusion and denigration of artists who are people of colour) and also create a space that explores and celebrates the creativity of people of colour in a nuanced and intelligent way. By centring films by people of colour, we create vital explorations emerging from contemporary diasporas that are automatically global in nature. Obviously both people of colour and queer people are told to think of their lives as being minority lives. But in our lived realities we are at the centre of our existence. It is important to recognise that globally people of colour are numerically the majority yet the artistic canon that dominates in the west does not reflect this. Consequently we had masses of amazing films to choose from.
Kuma Hina
Is it important to you that GLITCH film festival engages those who might not necessarily identify with the QTIPOC demographic?
Yes it is, and everyone is welcomed to GLITCH. We always try to emphasise that. GLITCH is a very multi-faceted event. We see it as both generating solidarity for queer people of colour specifically and also for all queer people. The films being screened are great so we think they will appeal to lovers of cinema in general and also to people with an interest in experimental film regardless of sexual orientation. It’s common for people who don’t identity as LGBT to go to queer film festivals and we hope GLITCH will be no exception. We’ve tried to make the festival as accessible as is possible with our resources. We’re making all the films captioned for deaf / hard of hearing audiences and all the live events are BSL interpreted. A future aim is for audio descriptions to be available. And of course GLITCH is free. We are on low incomes ourselves and know what it’s like to want to go to arts events and not be able to because of the cost, so we wanted GLITCH to be different from that.
What kind of events do we have to look forward to in the festival?
A mixture of features, documentaries and very strong shorts programmes. There are filmmakers present for Q & As, panel discussions, live performance, spoken word, music, free haircuts and an after-party.
What would you say to any of our readers who want to get into filmmaking but don’t know how to make the first step and might be struggling financially?
Well, I suppose first we’d offer our sympathy. We live in a hierarchical and unjust society and people are disenfranchised from many, many things in life including self–expression. The reality is as long as it remains structured that way not everyone who wants to is going to be able to explore filmmaking… That said, people can have different ideas of what to means to get into filmmaking – it can mean succeeding commercially to the degree of receiving budgets large enough to create feature films or it can mean having the equipment and technical know how of to create your own short films on a limited budget. We’re able to help with the last category.
Advice: watch a lot of film, watch a lot of film made on a low budget, continue to engage with all the other art forms, gain experience upon other peoples shoots, try community access projects, buy a cheap camera or use your phone and begin to shoot and experiment, watch online tutorials, use a tripod or some steadying device (unless you actively don’t want to), paying to learn how to edit rather than paying other people to edit is cheaper in the long run, there are lots of great free tutorials online too, don’t forget to record the best possible sound, practice story boarding and preplanning each shot, co-operate with people you like and who are supportive of you, the book Girl Director by Andrea Richards is very inspiring and has lots of tips..
If our readers wanted to get involved with Digital Desperados how would they do this?
In general we would say if people feel they have something to offer to our projects just to get in touch – we always mail back! People who are supportive of our aims are very welcome to contact us about volunteering at GLITCH – we always have a variety of tasks needing done. This year, people are volunteering by doing door and desk shifts, documenting the festival via film and photography, doing social media on our behalf, meeting filmmakers at the airport etc. We welcome public screenings of the films made on the course – so anyone organising an event who’d like to include them can get in touch with us to get free screening copies.
Any woman of colour who is interested in the course should email us at info@digitaldesperados.org. We have a selection process for the course that involves filling out an application form and then an interview. And of course we always welcome contact with people of colour led projects, artists and filmmakers who want us to archive or screen their films etc. or co-operate in some other way.
[Rebecca Moore]
GLITCH takes place from 19 – 28 March at the CCA in Glasgow. For more information, visit the Digital Desperados website.