Oska Bright On the Road comes to Bradford by Alison

Thursday 26th April 2012

Blog Category: Acting Company Blog

Mind the Gap submitted four short film to the Oska Bright Film Award and not one but all four went through the final stage and Thug Dance was short-listed for the award. We didn't win the award but we were very excited to have made that far.

Oska Bright is a company run for and by people with learning disabilities, that every two years, put up a great film festival in Brighton and in between goes out on the road with a selection of films and we are really pleased to be hosting a screening event.

Here, at Mind the Gap we have a small group of disabled artists called IF (Ideas Forum) that works in close collaboration with the company as consultants for its creative directions. There's five of us and lately we have been busy selecting the short films for the Oska Bright Screening event. We had to choose amongst many films, it was quite challenging as there were so many different genres from animations, documentaries to performance type. Ours are: Thug Dance by Alison Short looks at mistaken identity, Swiming Pool, by Joanne Haines and, in Phone Stealing by Zara Mallinson, a gang of thugs confront Chloe - how will she react?

From an insight we tried to choose the most appropriate film for a young crowd. We have a film and media workshop before the film screening and we hope that some of the young people coming for the workshop will stay to the screening too.

We hope to get young people interested in the film workshop that we are doing as well as adults and actually anyone interested in films. We hope that the people who view the short films realise actually how much potential people with learning disabilities have in film making. People with learning disabiliets are still stereotyped and we want to overcome views and open people's horizons.

One last comment? People have applied for the Oska Bright award from overseas so I can definitely say that we are privilege in being chosen for one of their screening.

It's going to be an inspiring and fun night of quality cinema!
We look forward to meeting the Oska Bright crew and all of you who want to join us.

The event is just £3 per person. Please come along!

Alison Short

View list of all blog categories