Actor
Wil Johnson will host the opening night of the 7th British Urban
Film Festival in October, the producers of BUFF 2012 have announced.
Johnson,
whose previous film and TV credits include “Waking the Dead”, “Waterloo Road”
and “Babymother”, will be making his debut as festival presenter having
previously featured in starring roles at BUFF in the films ‘Disoriented
Generation’ and ‘Colour Blind’.
SERTUC
Film Club, which has agreed...
From Top Boy to Wuthering Heights, the much vaunted and much celebrated prominence of cultural diversity in British film and TV shows no signs of abating and continues to rouse and excite cinema buffs both here and abroad. In a month which has already seen Sket, Demons Never Die & Death in Paradise entertain the masses, there is much to take in – including yet more awards for David is Dying; introducing the newest member of the BUFF board, journalist and filmmaker Jessie Grace Mellor; an...
“Charles Thompson is a Godsend. I’m fortunate to have started out in media under the tutelage of Charles almost a decade ago now. I was there when Screen Nation was in its infancy and I’m privileged to still be a part of it all albeit as a supporter of this year’s event where another of my mentors (Menelik Shabazz) will be rightly honoured also. I have a lot of time for Charles who in turn has shown a lot of time for me and for so many people in the film industry who would’ve taken g...
Who would be a media mogul ey? The last few weeks and months has seen the likes of Simon Cowell and Rupert Murdoch become the story for the wrong reasons. For months, the press were told who was in and who was out in the game of musical chairs regarding this year’s X Factor judges. Eventually we said goodbye to Danni Minogue and Cheryl Cole and hello to Kelly Rowland and Tulisa Contostavlos (Peter Dickson, the voice of X-Factor will certainly have his hands full announcing her name in full e...
Online, on-air and in person, this is BUFF. And so said the voice of BUFF which greeted the masses of online followers with the May 31 announcement of this year’s opening feature. And though the dulcet tones of Ewan Allinson and DJ Elayne Smith will continue to form a cornerstone of the BUFF movement, things are going to be a little bit different round here. From September, the 2011 British Urban Film Festival will be coming at ya with a whole new look which means, finally, that the buffest fi...
Some people call it a newsletter, most delete it from their inbox, others try to emulate it, and for the rest of you – well, going online isn’t quite the same until you’ve received it... its’ the BUFF Blog!!!
Until recently, most BUFF blogs were written by the BUFF ghostwriter. In the 2 years since the advent of the UK’s 1st ever film festival monthly blog, a variety of voices from the world of film and TV have been invited to offer their own unique voice on the industry by whi...
No matter how many times BUFF ventures down to Soho to get entertained, the result is always the same. And no matter how you dress it up, January is almost invariably a month-long period of attrition, angst and apathy. So it seemed perfectly reasonable to expect a good time to be had when yours truly was invited down to Soho on a cold and wet Friday evening for a preview screening of ‘David is Dying’ – the debut feature-length drama penned, and produced by Stephen Lloyd Jackson and Andy ...
Over the past 12 months, BUFF has invited filmmakers and journalists to offer their thoughts and experiences of the industry. Now its’ my turn. In what has been a year of exciting developments, BUFF was the first media outlet to announce the winners of the Film London Best of Boroughs awards – one of whom submitted their entry into the British Urban Film Festival only weeks before. The awards just happened to take place in the same week it was announced that the UK Film Council was to be...
At the time of going to press, a woman in China has sued a cinema and the distributors of the movie ‘Aftershock’ for wasting her time with adverts. According to the Xinhua news agency, Chen Xiaomei claims the Polybona International Cinema and film distributors Huayi Brothers Media Corporation should have told her of the length of the pre-movie commercials. Chen, a lawyer, accused the Xian-based picturehouse and the distributors of violating her freedom of choice and wasting her time. The cla...
The British Urban Film Festival 2010 4th, 5th, 6th September For immediate release Chairman's formal announcement The British Urban Film Festival returns. The annual 3-day event which is free to all ages kicks off on Saturday 4th September at Tottenham’s Bernie Grant Arts Centre – named after the black Labour politician who was MP for the area for over a decade. The stage play-turned-movie “Sus”, starring Clint Dyer, Rafe Spall & Ralph Brown, will be screened on the opening nig...
Who would be a film festival director ey? It was always going to be a chaotic period once the deadline for submissions closed on Sunday July 25 at midnight. It was even extended to 5pm the next day. Add to that filming with Lateef Lovejoy for the festival and the debut of ‘Buff on Tour’ in Cricklewood at 7.30pm the next day also - and the phrase ‘killing hours’ comes to mind, a phrase which embodies the amount of energy being exhausted – and shared in equal measure by this year's fes...
If it feels like the frequency of buff blogs are being stepped up, the signs are that the festival is getting nearer. This year’s event marks the 5th annual gathering of filmmakers, the media and the general public to the British Urban Film Festival, now widely accepted as the first stop for urban films. As the late Michael Jackson quotes in one of his songs ‘it don’t matter if you’re black or white’, the festival acts as a tool to highlight, to showcase and to champion the growth of...
This time 5 years ago, Noel Clarke was playing Billie Piper’s screen boyfriend in Doctor Who. Since then, our man Noel not only starred in ‘Kidulthood’ (recently screened again on BBC3), he went onto write and direct its’ sequel, ‘Adulthood’ – collecting a Bafta along the way. He has since starred in ‘Heartless’ and ‘Centurion’. He also starred in ‘Doghouse’ with Stephen Graham, Danny Dyer and Terry Stone, and has just released ‘4,3,2,1’ – considered by some to ...
Buff Enterprises has launched its’ biggest ever call for submissions for British Urban Film Festival 2010 – bringing together independent filmmakers from across the nation, to submit their own films. Buff Enterprises launched in July 2005 with the aim of providing a healthy alternative to the showcasing of urban independent cinema in the UK. Since then there has been a concerted effort by the UK film industry to address this imbalance in the cinema landscape both on and off screen. As a resu...
British urban film is a new genre and everyone’s excited by what’s happening in urban music. It’s been a great year and there’s that same sense of excitement in film – it’s our time. And whilst one is always looking for that opportunity to blow its’ own trumpet, those opening remarks were quoted by Mo Ali, the director of recently released Shank, the futuristic drama starring Adam Deacon (Adulthood), Ashley Thomas (aka Bashy) and Kaya Scodelario (Skins). Recent Buff blogcasts have ...
The shortest month of the year is far from short on the movies front as news emerges with regards to the recent BAFTA nominations. Ahead of the big buff bash on Sunday February 21, the marmite film Avatar – so called because you either love it or you hate it – has been nominated for 8 awards including best film and best director. And having picked up the big one at the recent Golden Globes, Avatar looks set to sweep up much in the same way that Slumdog Millionaire did 12 months ago. Precious...
Film buffs will continue to be spoiled in 2010 as the awards season continues in full swing with the long awaited release of ‘Precious’ at the end of January. Produced by Tyler Perry and Oprah Winfrey, Precious (Based on the novel 'Push’ by Sapphire) is set in Harlem in 1987 and is the powerful and disturbing story of an obese teenage black girl whose life is a living hell. Pregnant for the second time by her father and bullied and abused both emotionally and physically by her mother, she ...
On Friday October the 2nd, the 2nd annual British Urban Film Festival (BUFF) launched at the Picture House cinema in Stratford – the home of the 2012 Olympics. And whilst East London has been no stranger to BUFF in the past, a capacity crowd on the opening night confirmed the keenly anticipated line-up of film-making talent on show. One of the standout highlights was the Michael Jackson tribute, paying homage to the king of pop – thanks to the power of youtube and the endless choice of mat...
For immediate release:
After the success of last year’s event, organisers of the 2009 British Urban Film Festival (BUFF for short) are to once again offer free tickets to the public in what’s been dubbed ‘credit crunch cinema’, part of its’ strategy to capitalise on the growing interest in urban independent film and making it accessible to the public at large.
Launched last December when the credit crunch began to hit people financially, over 400 people took advantage of free tic...
How many times can one tell the gospel truth? The aim of this blog is to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the gospel truth, well 99.9% of the truth, which means that whatever gets published here cannot be misconstrued in any other way than what you are actually reading and the context with which one takes acceptance of the truth. Now that we've got that out of the way let's get on with it...
Working for Buff Enterprises, the parent company of the British Ur...
