Brief Encounters 1 · Bristol
96 films from 10 countries are recorded in the archive for this edition.
The inaugural Brief Encounters launched in October 1995 as Bristol's celebration of the centenary of cinema, programmed by Jayne Pilling with Andrew Kelly as Head of Cultural Development. The festival showcased Bristol's filmmaking heritage — from Aardman's Oscar-winning animation to BBC Bristol's talent development schemes — alongside international classics, experimental dance-film collaborations, and a special live performance by Keith and Julie Tippett accompanying silent films. Guests included Peter Lord, Nick Park, Dave Borthwick and Kenneth Anger, with strands covering Bristol filmmaking, archive advertisements, dance and film, and music video.
Read the 1995 Brief Encounters programme on the Internet Archive
A real-life recording of a visit to the dentist is animated – to painfully funny effect.
A young filmmaker's satirical view of film festivals and some of the creeps who inhabit them, with a highly unusual blend of live-action and animation.
In which a young would-be chorister is auditioned; from the original Animated Conversation series, by a filmmaker who went on to become a highly successful commercials director, in both animation and live-action.
The classic tear jerker BRIEF ENCOUNTER is wittily reworked as a modern gay romance in high contrast black and white, full of flirting, yearning, and emergency stops.
Set in a world where vegetables have become almost extinct, and subject to vivisection experiments by shady dealers...until the vegetables start biting back. Surreal ecological comedy/thriller mixing live action, model animation and pixillation.
ANCESTRAL SHADES explores the colonial legacy of Britain and a young black man's struggle to overcome this. His final emancipation comes through his spiritual African ancestry.
A 'road movie' from a Sufi perspective, meditating on cultural traditions and modern British life, to the accompaniment of Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan's music.
The filmmaker, an artist herself, explores the work of women artists of the 17th and 18th centuries, via an imaginative mix of live-action and animation.
From Aardman Animations' Lip Sync series, in which Bill speaks frankly about his experiences and family life during WW2, revealing astonishing resilience in the face of Hitler, subsidence and a slightly deaf coalman. The animation hilariously underscores Bill's tendency to hyperbole.
An owl falls in love with a goose which consequently leads to some unexpected situations – especially once they start a family.
The film that launched one of the most successful advertising campaigns of recent years (Heat Electric); so here's the original from Aardman's Lip Sync series....
A joyous tour-de-force of sand animation, as strange desert animals help a man, made of sand, build a sandcastle in which they can play and dance.
A bulldog adopts a very cute little kitten, and discovers feelings he didn't know big tough male dogs ever experienced!
Do Wallace and Gromit need any introduction? See this multi-award winning comedy thriller on the big screen!
The Post Office helps resolve a lover's tiff in this rarely seen live-action film from animator Len Lye, with surrealist touches.
A cynical, jazzed-up version of Frankie and Johnny, from UPA, an animation studio that revolutionised cartoons in the '50s, with stunning designs and adult subject matter.
Chuck Jones always claimed the libidinous skunk Pepe le Peu as his alter-ego; here he's in a movie studio in a send up of silent romantic melodramas.
Jane Horrocks plays a 'learner lesbian' in this wry coming-out comedy.
An urban fairy tale about a shy left-luggage attendant who falls in love with one of his customers.
The sputtering chemistry of burgeoning romance is wittily explored in this charming comedy of errors, which helped launch the feature-film careers of its two stars in CIRCLES OF FRIENDS.
One of the rare animators working with computers who's achieved believable characters with his films. In Knickknack we follow the frustrated amorous exploits of a snowman imprisoned in a snow-scene ornament!
Wonderful widescreen monochrome, with a nod to THE WIZARD OF OZ, though with very up-to-date sexual politics. A perfect spring day takes a turn for the worse when a tornado moves into Texas and Ray, a young weather scientist, learns the woman he lives with has just slept with his best frie
From the director of THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, whose work for MTV included this wonderful fiction short. The film combines live-action and multitechnique animation to create the off-balance world of an outcast artist hero from a higher dimension, reborn on earth as the world's lowest
Watch the birth of the cool in this style-setting moody monochrome portrait of jazz musicians at work, a cult item for jazz lovers and style devotees.
Taken from Bob Dylan's World Gone Wrong album BLOOD IN MY EYES was filmed around Camden by fellow musician and Dylan fan Dave Stewart.
Sparks promo which plays with the style of '40s movie trailers.
Inspired by NATURAL BORN KILLERS this short film stars controversial rap artist Snoop Doggy Dog.
An underground classic that now seems a forerunner of the rock video, with its self-conscious media quotations, mock-heroic view of urban youth culture, and use of rock 'n'roll. The film continues to inspire and influence filmmakers today.
Inspiration for countless TV ads, though none have duplicated its amazing technical achievement. Dedicated to chaos, anti-social madness and the problem of getting a lot of people in and out of the same room at the same time and unbeknownst to each other. It should only take two to tango..
Best known for his feature films, such as LOULOU, POLICE, A NOS AMOURS, Pialat began his career making shorts, and this long-lost sardonic film essay on suburbia is a real discovery.
A toy dog ventures out to find an orange for his mistress and finds himself caught up in a surrealistic world of Parisian low-lifers and midnight debauchery. A major influence on Tim Burton's THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS.
In which the fairy of that new-fangled appliance, the telephone, guides its novice users in a set of rather camp vignettes, culminating in a Busby Berkeley-like extravaganza. As with Lye's N or NW, this promotional film displays the strong influence of Surrealism in Britain at the time. The script was based on page 6 of the 1936 telephone directory!
Malcolm LeGrice has been one of the most influential experimental filmmakers in the UK, as well as part of a tradition within the avant-garde of using found footage, collage, and the operation of chance. This film uses both negative and positive prints and colour filters to refilm original 8mm footage. The Brian Eno score enhances the hauntingly beautiful effect.
Post-modernists eat your heart out, Daffy Duck can give you deconstruction in seven minutes flat – and make you laugh, as he battles with an unseen and sadistic animator to retain his on-screen integrity.
Shot entirely on location in St Petersburg's metro, this powerful drama provides a chilling insight into the damaged psyche of the former Soviet Union's forgotten heroes. The film so impressed Oliver Stone he tried to negotiate remake rights!
Brilliantly executed comic drama in which an animated character battles with his human creator.
The first film-school graduate to win a BAFTA, David Anderson's debut explores a child's rich fantasy life through an amazing array of different techniques – and launched Anderson's award-winning career in animated short films and commercials, several of which were made in Bristol (DEADSY, DOOR, DREAMLESS SLEEP).
Frustration and terror at his parents' endless bickering seems to give a young boy super-human powers: with spectacular results.
Stunning animation that celebrates African music, dance and the human body.
A romance for hands and faces – and the odd foot – in a choreographed film that uses close-ups to brilliant effect.
Witty, stylish and occasionally delirious, a fantasy train journey that delivers adventures to outdo any of the British Rail ads.
The extraordinary CandoCo dancers explore physicality, identity and movement.
A young dancer's promising career is curtailed by a catastrophic accident. Rage and frustration conflict with memories of childhood, happiness and the sheer joy of movement, yet the latter emerges triumphant in this stunning award-winning film.
Oscar-nominated tour-de-force of animation, a triangular relationship is dynamically explored through figurative and abstract animation to a range of African music.
Wittily deadpan comedy of the grotesque, in which a piece of string passes through a bewildering variety of bodily orifices.
Savage social satire in the guise of Wild West mythology: 'if you want to fit in around here, you'd best do what's expected of you'.
Another witty and acerbic fable, with a side-swipe at the tabloid press: here the whole of 'Joesville' are disgusted by the behaviour of their young folk.
A stop-frame showdown between scientific specimens – led by a stuffed duck-billed platypus – and a man-made techno-monster. A visceral, creepy cross between Tales from the River Bank, Starewicz and Hammer horror.
An animated nightmare at the dentist's: a mouth forcibly immobilised for a dental plundering. Beware for movie mad dental practitioners.
Wicked humour and troubling satire, in a film Svankmajer claims 'mirrors my childhood aversion to food'.
A married couple undress for bed after a night out, to rather macabre and unexpected results.
Under analysis, Alex Castaire's revelations spiral into a vortex of sexual intimidation, featuring cat women, poodle girls, fire-eating pimps, iron maidens, trollism, bondage, humiliation and hot chocolate. The director was expelled from the Royal College of Art, which doesn't seem to have hurt his successful career in commercials – even if a number of them have been banned!
Meditation on an Armenian painting and a deeply intimate film of his baby son, from the director of EXOTICA.
A bizarre monochrome mini-melodrama with a cast of Edgar Allen Poe-like characters, from the director of TALES FROM THE GIMLI HOSPITAL.
Typically fabulist in manner, Ruiz (THREE CROWNS AND THE SAILOR) provokes a bizarre and dream-like dialogue between the Chinese painter Shi Tao and the Velásquez painting Las Meninas.
A witty, at times frightening and deliriously off-beat tale of a young woman who becomes increasingly disturbed at the apparently human contents of her friend's suitcase. From the director of WORLDS WITHOUT PITY.
A typically wry and humorous look at suburban life through the eyes of Mike Leigh. In between serving cough pastels and contraceptives at the local chemist, Joy dreams of her perfect man.
A Gothic cautionary tale of a boy's obsession with the stories of Edgar Allen Poe, an early animated short from the director of BATMAN.
Gloriously deadpan celebration of Blackpool's Winter Palace Gardens, which led to the director's feature film HEAR MY SONG.
Subtle and not-so-subtle rock star ego-confrontation between Iggy Pop and Tom Waits from the director of DOWN BY LAW.
The success of this independently made thriller, based on an urban myth, enabled Koepp's transition from successful screenwriter (JURASSIC PARK) to feature film directing on TRIGGER EFFECT for Stephen Spielberg's new company.
Dominique Pinon, who's since become a Jeunet & Caro regular (DELICATESSEN, CITY OF LOST CHILDREN) recounts some of his likes and dislikes.
An evocative impression of a shower of rain in the streets of Amsterdam from one of the great documentarists, here in lyrical mood and displaying a sure sense of composition, light and dark on reflective surfaces, and the potential for camera movement. The umbrella shots predated Hitchcock by a good twenty years.
A portrait of Britain at war, but instead of the usual didactic commentary, the soundtrack is almost entirely composed of natural sounds. The 'positive message' about the unity of the British at war is all the more convincing because of Jennings's sensibility to the world of ordinary people.
A WW2 propaganda film – but also a hilarious spoof on war pictures and espionage thrillers, with Daffy as the platoon's woman-hater sent on a mission to get past the Nazi seductress 'Hata Mari'.
A mother's love for her son knows no bounds? An apparently simple story of African village life which is all the more shocking for its questioning of taboos.
A surreal and amusing new take on Kafka's 'Metamorphosis', transmitted through Frank Capra's IT'S A WONDERFUL LIFE and directed by comedy actor Peter Capaldi. This year's Oscar winner for best short film.
All the cosy clichés about close-knit village life and community are slyly turned upside down in this animated tale of greed, envy and gossip.
At Ray's, executives invite one another to dance in the same way they propose a business meeting, shamelessly trying to curry favour as they whirl around the floor, always careful not to tread on the toes of their more important partners.
A black comedy for the '90s, with a cruelly humorous prognosis for the fate of the '80s yuppie couples, stunningly shot in Cinemascope and in the style of a '50s noir, with a credit list featuring the cream of the US indie scene.