The New UK Underground Film Movement

Duncan Reekie

 

The Godfather of the Exploding Cinema collective, plus in addition to making films such as Maldoror and curating screenings and events, he wrote the mind-blowing history of British underground filmmaking called Subversion: The Definitive History of Underground Cinema that is mandatory reading for any underground film nut. A true hands on maverick.

Craig Roberts

Compelling character actor who has now turned his hand at directing and fits the mold of being the perfect Trojan Horse to enter the mainstream film industry and shake it up from the inside. His debut feature film Just Jim is a darkly funny coming of age story shot on a low budget in Wales. Roberts is a self taught filmmaker and a strong advocate for supporting Welsh cinema.

Daniel Fawcett & Clara Pais

Defining the ideology that two heads are better than one, this power team are the founders of The London Underground Film Festival and Film Panic magazine. Experimenters of the independent film vanguard with some of the trippiest films to come out in recent memory such as their mind bending feature debut Savage Witches.

Fabrizio Federico

Crashing together the poetic and the strange; whether its making micro budget features about alienation, sex and death cult philosophies in debut Black Biscuit or counting down to generational Armageddon in the form of technology and social media addiction with new film Pregnant. He is the founder of the Pink8 Manifesto which encourages new filmmakers to basically "Turn on, tune in, and drop out" . Get in touch with their inner improvised shaman and lose your mind.

Tony Burke

The filmmaker you love to hate. His thought provoking works have caused scandal and bewilderment, hence an artist in the truest sense of the word. Mixing together loneliness, beauty and desire. A body of work that captures the everyday absurdity of where bizarre circumstances can lead you.  His skillful portrayals on the poignancy of life can be experienced in his latest films The Fox and Him.


The Fox (watch)
  

Scotland's mean streets are kicked in the balls by the presence of Mr Mackenzie's camera. Hip Hop and Cinema come crashing down the rabbit hole as the dystopian odyssey of Dimention Zero captures the wilderness of an hallucination called life. Beautifully shot on anything that he could get his hands on, depicting the crash city youth of hoodies, police and music. Its final message sublimely true; We are all art, as soon as we embrace ourselves.

Ben Charles Edwards

Whether its Fantasy, B Movies, Avant Garde or Dark Comedy there's no genre that this filmmaker cant master with Zen like ease. Embracing stylistic glamour with the unpredictability of Underground Cinema. His debut feature film Set The Thames on Fire displays an impressive claustrophobic disjointed atmosphere and at the center of all this a fearless ring leader weaves his directorial magic.

Official Website

Dont Fence Me In ** SAVAGE WITCHES (Film // One To Watch)

The beauty of Underground Cinema is that it is driven by unpolitical and immediate needs and slides like a shooting star into dream worlds with no social boundaries. Savage Witches (co-directed by Daniel Fawcett & Clara Pais) looks for the truth that comes with being a seeker.

The film proves what an unstoppable and uncompromising creative force the Fawcett & Pais team legitimately is. They are truly a transatlantic collective. Organizers of the The London & Porto Underground Film Festival's, editors of the influential One+One Filmmakers Journal and  co-directors CINE-REBIS. They are on fire.

Savage Witches tells the tale of Gretchen and Margarit, two misunderstood psychedelic school girls who would like to be able to play and float on a river forever and ever instead of working and adhering to their tyrannic school principals rules. 
They dress up and play fight, spit on what society thinks about their other worldliness, both looking like wild rabid carnival characters. Its cinematography is a kaleidoscope of HD, DV, Super8 and their favorite format VHS!

The film perfectly reflects what a prison society can often be like to a fertile young independent creative mind. How curiosity, imagination and craziness can often be put on trial.

Movie's such as Savage Witches follow a tradition similar to other maverick filmmakers like Věra Chytilová and Derek Jarman who tackled the teenage psyche in all it's anarchic glory.
Casting spells on all who watch these films, especially those in search of the magic that will set them free. Purified by the rain, following the arrows, slogans such as ''Let's destroy the World'' flash across the skies, erasing humankind and all its dead ideas and forgotten history. Tempting you to fly with them ** gimme your hands cause you're wonderful!!

Darkness + Silence

The duo are currently filming back to back projects The Kingdom of Shadows and Black Sun.
''Making a movie is an amazing thing, it’s magic! We never suffer from writer’s block or a lack of ideas, we are interested in so many things and there never seems to be enough time to do them all''.  

Savage Witches is a film that wants to burst out of the screen and cross over into life, to have the vision and experience of the world enriched and transformed by the artifice of cinema.
But when is too much freewill considered dangerous? When does freedom become manipulated and sold to the masses? 

Respectively a film like Savage Witches will never have that problem.
History is dead, long live infinity.  

For more info Visit: http://theundergroundfilmstudio.co.uk/