The project, The 81⁄2 Foundation, would introduce children to the best of world cinema when they reach the age of eight-and-a-half, in the same way the Oscar-winning actress hopes the 81⁄2 Film Festival she and former Edinburgh Film Festival director Mark Cousins are running in a disused bingo hall in her home town of Nairn will stimulate wider interest in the world of film.

The idea was unveiled by Ms Swinton and Mr Cousins in the first film to be screened at their film festival on Friday, a short piece filmed in part at Ms Swinton’s Nairn home and showing the Ballerina Ballroom before its transformation into the “Cinema of Dreams”.

In the film Ms Swinton reads a letter addressed to her eight-and-a-half year old son Xavier, inspired by his asking what people’s dreams were like before cinema and going on to talk about her belief in the imaginative strength of film. In reply, Mr Cousins writes a letter addressed to his own eight-and-a-half-year-old self about his love of film, but fears that innovative and unusual films are being squeezed out of film-goers’ perception by high profile blockbusters. “Tying Tilda’s thoughts and mine together, I wish for this: something called the 81⁄2 Foundation,” he states.
“A trust, based in Scotland, perhaps where Tilda and I live, which would make 20 films available for free on DVD to children around the world, on their 81⁄2 birthday, their movie day.”

Speaking afterwards, Mr Cousins confirmed the foundation was something he and Ms Swinton wanted to see come into being and like the film festival could start off in Ms Swinton’s home area. “Tilda’s really enthusiastic,” Mr Cousins said. “It’s like we’re trying to create a little bit of activism for films.”

Source: Inverness Courier

If you could imagine the opposite of Cannes, Nairn would be it. A new film festival, which Oscar-winning actor Tilda Swinton is founding in her hometown of Nairn, north-east Scotland, is to have no red carpets, no ranks of paparazzi and no designer evening dresses. Entry to the films will cost you £3 or a tray of home-baked cakes; and the audience will sit on beanbags.

Needless to say, the festival will have its own kind of glamour. Aside from the presence of Swinton, Joel Coen, one half of the Coen brothers, will programme two evenings of films for the event. His choices are being kept a secret at the moment; but, according to co-organiser Mark Cousins, “They are as daft as a brush. If you went through 5,000 films, you would never guess them.”

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According to the Variety.com a Roman Polanski’s adaptation of Robert Harris’ “The Ghost” is set to move forward with a star-studded cast led by Nicolas Cage and Pierce Brosnan, also joined by fellow Oscar winner Tilda Swinton. Production on “The Ghost” will begin in September with Cage playing a ghostwriter working on the memoirs of England’s former prime minister. The secrets he uncovers may have something to do with why a former ghostwriter turned up dead. Brosnan will play the prime minister, while Swinton will play the his wife, who begins to fall for the ghostwriter. Polanski and Harris wrote the script together. Swinton and Cage have previously teamed up for “Adaptation.”

“Derek,” a fragmentary portrait of the British filmmaker, painter, set designer and writer Derek Jarman, is a cinematic scrapbook of the life and times of an iconoclast, aesthete and provocateur who died of AIDS in 1994. Assembled by the director Isaac Julien, the fragments are clustered around a poetic epistle, “Letter to an Angel,” written by Mr. Jarman’s friend Tilda Swinton and published in The Guardian in 2002.
Her letter is a sorrowful tribute to a friend and a defiant manifesto on behalf of playful, uninhibited, commercially marginal self-expression in the arts. The enemy is what Ms. Swinton calls “the dead hand of good taste.” “Art is now indivisible from the idea of culture, culture from heritage, heritage from tourism, tourism from what I saw emblazoned recently on the window of an American chain store in Glasgow — ‘the art of leisure,’ ” she writes with blistering contempt. As excerpts from Mr. Jarman’s films whiz by, a common element is a sense of the actors playing games of dress-up after rummaging through a trunk in the attic.
Opens on Monday in Manhattan.
Directed by Isaac Julien; written and narrated by Tilda Swinton; director of photography, Nina Kellgren; edited by Adam Finch; produced by Colin MacCabe and Eliza Mellor; released by Normal Films. At the Roy and Niuta Titus Theaters, Museum of Modern Art. Running time: 1 hour 16 minutes. This film is not rated.
Source: New York Times

And hey folks, the gallery is now open for business again. It was hacked too many times so I had to take it down and upload everything, which I’m still in process of doing. But go, register and enjoy the pics!