August 2017

Letters to Ariadne will enjoy its world premiere at the Validate Yourself Film Festival in New York on 2 September 2017.

Letters to Ariadne

The screening will take place at 2pm at the Hotel RL by Red Lion, Brooklyn Bed-Stuy,
1080 Broadway, Brooklyn, NY 11221.

The film is comprised of a series of video-letters from director William Brown to his niece Ariadne as he travels around the world.

To this end, Letters to Ariadne features letters from places as diverse as England and Scotland, Canada and the USA, Italy, France, Mexico, Sweden, Macedonia and China.

The film is partly indebted to a Brown Fellowship that William won from the Museum of Fine Arts in Houston, Texas, to spend a month at the house of the late artist and photographer, Dora Maar, in Ménerbes, France.

VYFF

The screening follows a busy summer for Beg Steal Borrow. Not only have they shot both Sculptures of London and ~~This is Cinema~~, while also continuing to work on The Benefit of Doubt, #randomaccessmemory and Vladimir and William, but there have also been screenings of Circle/Line (at the East End Film Festival) and The New Hope, Roehampton Guerrillas (2011-2016), Ur: The End of Civilization in 90 Tableaux and Selfie (at the Straight-Jacket Guerrilla Filmmaking Festival).

The Validate Yourself Film Festival is an annual festival run by filmmaker Antoine Allen, whose Life is Too Short was completed in 2015.

The Straight Jacket Guerrilla Film Festival is this week showing four – yes, four! – Beg Steal Borrow films as part of its programme.

The Straight Jacket Guerrilla Film Festival.

The online festival, which specialises in underground, cult and experimental cinema, runs for a week, with a Beg Steal Borrow film playing on each of the festival’s first four days.

The running order sees our punk Don Quixote meets Star Wars film The New Hope playing on Tuesday 15 August.

A manifesto for the film can be read here: The New Hope – A Manifesto.

The New Hope is followed on Wednesday 16 August by Roehampton Guerrillas (2011-2016), a compilation of short films made by the titular group of guerrilla filmmakers and curated by William Brown.

Then our art house zombie homage to the Lumière brothers, Ur: The End of Civilization in 90 Tableaux, plays on Thursday 17 August.

And finally on Friday 18 August, the festival is showing Selfie, an essay-film about selfie culture comprised uniquely of moving-image selfies featuring William Brown.

The red poster for Ur: The End of Civilization in 90 Tableux

The Selfie poster, designed by the talented Angela Faillace.

We are completely delighted to be featuring so prominently as part of the festival, which is run by guerrilla filmmakers extraordinaire Fabrizio Federico and Laura Grace Robles.

The festival will culminate on Saturday 21 August with an awards ceremony at the Alamo Street Eat Bar in San Antonio,Texas. The ceremony runs from 9pm to midnight, with the Beg Steal Borrow films competing for Most Creative Feature Film. Let’s keep our fingers crossed!

Tune in to the Straight Jacket website in order to watch the films.

And click here to read an interview with William Brown about guerrilla filmmaking.

The Straight Jacket screenings come ahead of the World Premiere of Letters to Ariadne at the Validate Yourself Film Festival in New York on Saturday 2 September – and follow hot on the heels of the World Premiere of Circle/Line at London’s East End Film Festival in June.

In the meantime, we have also enjoyed preview screenings of The Benefit of Doubt at the Roxy Bar & Grill in London on 17 June and of Sculptures of London at the Film-Philosophy Conference at the University of Lancaster on 4 July.

We have also very nearly finished all filming for ~~This is Cinema~~, the principle shoot of which lasted between 10 and 23 July.

So… all in all a busy summer for Beg Steal Borrow. Let us hope that we have more screenings in the near future. But in the meantime… please support our work by checking out our films!