NDH44 Spectacular Optical
Spectacular Optical features the latest & boldest short films from our community of directors.
On Nov 12th at Century Club, we were thrilled to host the first UK screening of comedy hero/2-time NDH guest Steve Oram (Sightseers, Aaaaaaah!) & Tom Meeten’s new film Big Cat. - the emotional and mind blowing [seriously] Sundance short doc award winner Bob's Funeral by Jack Dunphy, and SXSW - this years feature doc winner Grand Theft Hamlet by Pinny Grylls & Sam Crane - and the recent London Film Festival with comedies of desperation The Real Thing by Charlie Fink and Not Surgery Hours by Tia Salisbury. We also have wonderful new delights from horror maestro Ben Steiner (The Stomach/Matriarch) with Off Cuts, female-led genre pieces featuring strange rituals from the past by Kelly Holmes with The Sin-Eater and Ruda Santos with Vibrations, and the very newest short Boys Like You from the prolific Bristol boy himself Paul Holbrook. These bold new films are still at fests/are not yet online.
We are really proud of this line up. It's a great snapshot of not only the work being done right now, and what's appealing to current festival programmers, but also the people working in our community. We are thrilled that many of the filmmakers will be in attendance on the night - come and give them the benefit of your wisdom after a couple of shandys at the bar afterwards.
Raffle prizes included a Videodrome BluRay (& Tshirts) in honour of our new shorts night name. Great Q&As - Top night everyone!
Pics courtesy of/thanks to Hannah Lovell.
LINEUP:
Big Cat by Steve Oram & Tom Meeten (first UK screening)
The Sin-Eater by Kelly Holmes (new 2024)
Vibrations by Ruda Santos (2023 Melies d'Or)
The Real Thing by Charlie Fink (LFF 2024)
Grand Theft Hamlet by Pinny Grylls/Sam Crane
Clips & chat with the SXSW feature doc winning team
Boys Like You by Paul Holbrook (new 2024)
Not Surgery Hours by Tia Salisbury (LFF 2024)
Off Cuts by Ben Steiner
(Dublin Horrorthon)
Bob’s Funeral by Jack Dunphy
(Sundance 2024 Short Doc Winner)
What is Spectacular Optical?
Spectacular Optical was a corporation featured in David Cronenberg's 1983 film Videodrome. A corporation running a chain of eyeglasses stores across the country, acting as a front for the company's true enterprise - intergovernmental weapons manufacture, and beyond this, an even darker investment - Videodrome, a cable TV show that secretly gave its audiences hallucination-inducing brain tumours which blur the line between hallucination and reality. The company sought to end the corrupting influence of media upon the masses by exposing people to the Videodrome signal in order to kill the depraved viewers who enjoyed the horrors it showed them. The Videodrome signal was a weaponized distortion of the research of media theorist Brian O'Blivion ('that is my television name') accessing what he believed to be a "higher" state of reality that could only be accessed through hallucinations.
We hope Big Dave will forgive us our heartfelt homage to his 1983 dystopian masterpiece. Long live the new flesh!