The 4th annual Liverpool John Moores MA Film Festival started on Monday, the 18th of March, with a great selection of documentaries created by film-makers from around the world.
There will also be Animated films on Tuesday the 19th of March.
There have been entries from 36 countries in the final programme over all categories and almost 3,000 submissions, making this a diverse international film festival.
MA Film students were given over 30 hours of short films to review, before narrowing it down to the finalists.
The documentaries included pieces created in the UK, Iran, Brazil, USA, Czech Republic and Poland.
The LJMU MA Film students said that they have benefited from the experience of reviewing all the short films and organising the event.
Frank Greally, MA Film Studies and Event Co-Ordinator, said: “That coming into this doing a module on film festivals, I didn’t really know what to expect, as I hadn’t given it too much thought.
But learning the theory behind film festivals, I didn’t realise how things worked geo-politically and there is so much to dive into such as social media and programming.
It has just opened my eyes to everything, its such a rich world, its peaked my interest.”
Emily White, MA Film Studies and Event Co-Ordinator, said: “We are kind of learning things that I would of never thought of previously and I’m seeing different career paths that I wouldn’t of thought of before starting this course.
I think there are so many practical skills we’re learning, such as public relations and Frank is doing the social media and trailer editing.”
Emily also stated that she learnt about the power of lighting, saying that some of the stories were great, but the lighting or the camera work was not quite clean, as getting this correct can bring a professional aspect to the film.
The festival will continue throughout the week and conclude on Friday with the awards ceremony at Scale in Liverpool.
You can view the finalist’s Films over the four categories online until Friday on this link:
https://ljmumashortfilmfestival.org/
