A film festival set up to celebrate movie-making by people from under-represented communities is going from strength to strength as it enters its third year at the University of Winchester.
Divergent Visions, which has a particular emphasis on short films made by people with disabilities and neurodiversity, attracted more than 150 entries from 20-plus countries.
These have been whittled down to nine films, ranging in length from 5 to 10 minutes, which will be screened at West Downs Auditorium on 15 October. Two of the line-up will be receiving their UK premieres at Winchester.
One of the premieres is Picturing Inclusivity – a documentary on an Irish autistic artist using time-lapse photography to identify spots of social refuge in busy city centre. The film’s director John Schaffer, based in Arizona, and the subject of the documentary, Stuart Nielsen from Cork, will be taking part in an online Q&A at the screening.
Appearing to field questions in person will be Sarah Leigh, whose film One for the Road (pictured above), takes the audience deep in vampire country, an attempt to rescue a lost family threatens to descend into a feeding frenzy. A fantastically fun and creepy adaptation of a Stephen King short story.
The other films on show are:
Keith (directed by Steven Fraser)
The ways people communicate on social media and the different identities they can create are explored in this stop-frame animated documentary.
Our Circle in the Storm (Ray Jacobs)
Sheltering from ever more extreme weather, the lives of a group of climate refugees (pictured) is presented as a loving dance. A moving visual poem from last year’s winner of the Best Film award.
The Paper Bag (Roshi Nasehi and Al Orange) Pictured top
Welsh-Iranian creative Roshi Nasehi recalls the sights, sounds and smells of her trip to Iran as a teenager, focusing on a taxi ride with her youthful grandmother and a handsome young man with a mysterious paper bag.
Radiotherapy (Debbie James, Corrianna Clarke and Jo Tyler)
Experiences of radiotherapy retold as hallucinatory visions in a visually stunning animation.
Mashed (Emily Freer)
An inventive and visceral no-budget documentary on growing up with little known eating disorder, Avoidant Restrictive Food Intake Disorder.
Miss Odd (Robyn Wisker-Stilling) Pictured above
An autistic silent DJ struggles to balance her joyful escapes into imagination with the intrusive social disapproval of the real world as she strives to find her own Mr Odd.
S o f t e d g e s m a l l d a n c e (Jiara Sha) UK PREMIER
Fragments of medical reports dance, rebel and construct new narratives of human experience in a remarkably calm yet affecting experimental film.
Following the screening, the winners of the Best Film and Best Student Film will be announced. There will also be an audience prize voted for on the night.
The festival comes under the umbrella of the Lived Perspectives Film Festivals, organised by two University staff members - Ian Roberts, a programme administrator in the School of Health and Care Professions, and Jess Redway a Nursing lecturer.
Ian, who is studying the community impact of small film festivals for his PhD at Winchester, said: “We work to give a voice to filmmakers who sometimes find it difficult to be noticed. The films aren’t all about disability. We’ve received every kind of genre from action movies to dance pieces”
Jess added: “The Festival combines Ian’s love of film with my disability activism to bring innovative and often challenging work before the audience it deserves. We have been really excited by the reception we received in our first two years, and we are confident that this year is going to be even stronger.”
Tickets for the festival, which are free, are available from https://www.livedperspectives.co.uk/
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