The LIDF is the UK’s largest independent documentary festival providing a platform for radical and groundbreaking output from around the globe. In 2011 the festival is scheduled to run for 10 days between 5th May and 15th May.

We look to support new and innovative filmmaking talent, and to ask filmmakers to participate in the ‘conversations’ and debates that run alongside the screenings. 2011 will see new and significant additions to the festival and new award categories.

Submissions can be via Withoutabox or the LIDF Official Entry Form

We look forward to seeing your films.

Official Entry Form

Frequently Asked Questions

Entry Regulations

Best Short: Cathedral

Film We Liked The Most: Shout

In his final speech, Hazard praised the stamina of his volunteer staff, his “formidable crew, likeable, skilled…and who do all the things I can’t do!”, who have been the unseen stars of the show. We all hope that the success of this year’s London International Documentary Festival will be repeated next year, and that you’ll join us!

Don Boyd told us the touching story of the effect being involved had on an aging and dementia-stalked Olivier;  after he later died, his own nurse called Boyd to tell him the actor had had a new lease of life after filming the piece. Jarman himself was very ill during filming. He wrote it at his famous farmhouse, where the garden was used as the backdrop for the first scene with Olivier. And despite Boyd agreeing that the piece would never be commissioned today, he was pleased to be able to tell us that the BBC have had to re-purchase it, intending to show it again.

As an end to the Festival, this warmly-received piece reminded us of everything the huge variety of films shown have set out do: invite us to remember the forgotten, or even meet the unknown for the first time. A moving finish.

This film is a dream-like, sepia-tinted, nostalgic homage to the Beat Generation in both America and Italy, where poetry festivals sprung up on beaches and hundreds cheered (or jeered) the vibrant performance poets as they feverishly screamed into microphones, tore off their clothes and exclaimed things like “Philosophers! The title of this poem is Fuck Off!”.
It is also a film that seeks to find out what has changed since that frequently romanticised period, and what purpose poetry can serve now.

‘Things have become more organised,’ explains one contemporary Roman poet, ‘they’re not so spontaneous.’ He laughs, ‘what we need is a sex and poetry rave party!’

Through interviews with modern poets, recitations, much graveyard wondering and beautiful old footage, our two poetic protagonists show us that poetry is still flourishing under the surface of popular culture in Italy, even if it is being written on mobile phones or MacBooks. And it asks how we can bring poetry to what it once was, out in the open and reaching vast audiences worldwide.

Nostalgic, hopeful, poignant, prospective and inspiring, ‘Poets’ is a wonderful film, filled with exerts from fantastic poems whose authors and words will forever remain within a certain arena of public consciousness, contrary to Keats’ famous grave inscription.

“Television is dead…the day of the tv commissioning editor is over.”

And here’s why. Several years ago, Nick Fraser, somewhat commissioning editor of the legendary Storyville, told Don Boyd he wanted him to make a film: Hamlet in China. Boyd, incredulous at first, spent a year researching his project and getting very, very excited, as the footage of potential settings – including the Great Wall – and potential actors – from the Chinese RADA-equivalent – shows.  It was to be a film within a play within a documentary. It was all planned. The pre-Olympics timing was just perfect. A day or so before everything was to be shipped, organized and begun, Nick Fraser rang up to announce…that the BBC had pulled their funding. Isn’t it ridiculous, Boyd opined, that for the sake of a sum about a third the size of Alan Yentob’s salary, the entire project was shelved.

During his commentary, it was clear to see that Boyd still has feelings for this project. Sadly, he thinks it’s unlikely to get made now, and all of his and others’ hard work will go to waste. This story really highlights the mercy at which filmmakers find themselves in the hands of commissioning editors. Don Boyd has a plan: ‘Highbrow’, a project he thinks will allow true creativity, a platform for the visual arts, with 25-30 ‘curators’ who won’t be answering to tyrannous executives, and which will be “as revolutionary as the printing press.”. In waiting for that to come about, we were privileged to see inside this director’s “notebook”.

Human Organ Traffic asks a number of questions for which there are no simple answers: ‘If it was a question of life or death for you or a loved one, would you be willing to pay to attain an organ illegally?’, ’should organ donation in living donors be made legal everywhere, even if the donors are most likely doing it as a result of extreme poverty and desperation?’

In an attempt to shed more light on these questions the director of H.O.T sought to document the experiences of the donors, from Brazil to Nepal, all of whom are deeply impoverished.
We also meet the middle agents who take a cash cut from the operation by putting the potential patients in touch with the right people.
The experiences were as varied as they were fascinating. From donors who felt it was worth doing on account of the large sum of money they received, to others who were conned out of any money at all, to the truly shocking disclosure that 95% of all organ donations in China are from executed prisoners, of which the money paid for them goes to the government.
Organ trafficking, it seems, is big business, and the only ones who appear to loose out in this global trade are the donors.

The enlightening panel after the film gave us an insight into the mind of a surgeon, who performs hundreds of transplants a year, and the director of the National Kidney Foundation, both of whom tackled the debates surrounding the ‘Opt- Out’ donation scheme being proposed by the government, and the severe complications, including the death of the donors, that these illegal operations can cause.

H.O.T is a call to arms for all those who get to watch this great documentary, but I’m yet still unsure what side is best to join.

Films such as ‘Companion of Kings’, about the people who frequent the dog tracks, somewhat of a hidden British tradition, and ‘Peter in Radioland’, a mish-mash of styles overlapping to create a representation of the closing-in world of Peter, an ex-teacher retreating into the safe, non-modernised world of “analogue”, were indicative of experimental styles of documenting experience. They often used voiceovers of the subjects, played over images of them not speaking, which gave the effect that they were sending you their thoughts.

A slight sense of déjà vu as we started this afternoon’s pieces with ‘Pollphail’, a brief piece about the abandoned and never-used purpose-built Pollphail village in Scotland, built to house the army of oilrig builders that never came, their usefulness becoming moot as the industry changed while their homes were being built. An artist, Mick McCraw, was building models and creating an exhibition of disappearing photographs of the empty buildings. The village looked coincidentally like that spraypainted in style by Agents of Change at Wednesday’s Horse Hospital showing of ‘The Ghostvillage Project’, so if the landlord really was keeping the location secret, as Timid was suggesting, the secret could be out. (EDIT: It is.) It’s exciting when these visual links are made and stories overlap – the bigger picture of the UK as a whole.

I met Dan in Paris while he was at the Récollets and I was attending the Ateliers Varan. I wanted to make a film about the relationship between the contemporary art scene and society, and I felt Dan and his art to be a paradigm of the critical sense applied to these systems.

When I first began to discover his creative process I thought we could collaborate on two different “rough materials”. He was working on the level of information (press, internet etc), and I would develop the narration through his actions, and at the same time I could work upon the level of the common reality that surrounds us, with some intersections that interrupted the narration.

In the space of the film we could somehow return the man to the centre of things, at least in the imaginary axis of the sight. I think that this was our central point of contact.

2. I love the way you mirror Dan’s interest in the little things that often get over looked, the beauty in the tiny details, through your patient way of filming. For example, lingering on the way a person walks or drinks, that captures their character beautifully. Did you find on being with Dan, that you were looking at things around you in a different way?

Dan’s interest is beyond the things themselves. For example when you see him looking around, you could never know what he is really looking at. That’s why when you compose the frame around what he sees, this frame should be introducing a question. Because the amazing thing happening there, is not in front of his eyes but behind them.

We each see the reality around us in different ways. Dan revels the inner paradox of human systems. Regarding this film, I desired to practice a gesture of empathy.

3. How does Dan see your film? As an extension of his art, the creation of an entirely new piece of art, or as something very different altogether?

Dan really accepted my film happening, without any control and I deeply appreciated this.

4. If you could pick anyone, what other artist would you most like to make a film about?

I would never make a film ‘about’ anyone, it would be impossible. I would make a film ‘with’ someone.

Part 1 of this evening started with the unlisted, quirky and timely ‘Credit Crunch’, which featured individuals giving sound bytes about their most personal possession, their purse, with stories entertaining and touching forming along the way, despite the owners of the purses not being pictured. James Newton’s ‘The Space You Leave’ (2009) was even more affecting, telling the personal stories of mothers and fathers and their families left in a limbo of unknowing when their children, in this case their sons, disappear without trace.  Neither of the mothers, expressing their feelings of loss, could bear to look at the camera, although Tim Reilly, whose son has been missing for far longer, and whom was featured in another documentary last year, could look at us directly and imploringly and enquire about his son.

‘The Moscow Correspondence’ was a piece of serendipity. Director Lottie Gammon was sent by her film school to Moscow to make a film about journalism. Just as she had started to make friends with and forma dialogue at critical paper The Moscow Correspondent, it was unceremoniously shut down. What follows is an intriguing portrait of human resilience and humour in the face of adversity, as well as the disturbing background image of the manipulative super-rich who manipulate our media (owner Lebedev, selling the Moscow Correspondent due to an apparent lack of funds, bought the London Evening Standard not three months later, suggesting the sudden revoking of the journalists right to work or earn compensation when made redundant was more down to the owner’s dislike of the content of their ‘freedom of speech’ stories.)

‘The Ghostvillage Project’ and ‘Hi High Rise’ were two pieces that also changed the tone. ‘The Ghostvillage Project’ (2009) documented the latest project of the graffiti-art group Agents of Change, changing an abandoned concrete village, built for but never lived in by oil workers and their families in Scotland, into an innovative art gallery that substantially changed the tone of the local eyesore. ‘Hi High Rise’ (2010), excitingly shot entirely on a digital SLR and using the stills to create animated sequences showing life inside the tower block, also worked to change common perceptions of the residents of high rise blocks, interestingly by only using the voices of those who lived in the Hornchurch Court block in Manchester and images of it from different angles, forcing the viewer to literally alter their normal perception. And ‘London Vampires’(2009)…actually did nothing really to alter the classic stereotypical view of those who like to imagine themselves drinkers of blood and residents of the between-spaces of London, but still proved insightful into those stereotypes.

The panel with ‘London Vampires’’ Trevor Hargreaves, Lottie Gammon, TAPE, aka Jan Dixon and Emily Dixon who also live in the towerblock they filmed for ‘Hi High Rise’, and artist and director Timid of Agents of Change, in conversation with Patrick Hazard, was an intimate affair that really allowed the audience to hear the stories behind the stories, and despite Part 2 of the evening’s audience straining to get in, the conversation flowed. This was such an exciting event, although hopefully next year there will also be more UK features for the Festival to screen to similarly-excited crowds.