Encounters Festival 2017: An Introduction

This year I attended the Encounters short film festival in Bristol for 3 days. I was there from Tuesday the 19th until Friday the 22nd so I had plenty of time to watch lots of films and explore Bristol as it’s a place I hadn’t been to before.

The aim of the festival is to present audiences with fresh talent and new work in film. This year is the first that they’ve introduced immersive viewing through the use of vertual reality. By focusing on the content that can be produced through VR they brought to question whether that is the future of cinema. On reflection I wish I had gone to see more of the VR screenings during my time at the festival.

I wanted to focus what I write on this blog about the way relationships and love are presented through the films I saw at the festival. As someone who is quite bitter about romantic relationships at the moment I was interested to see how other people felt and how they expressed those feelings through film and animation. I will also be talking a bit about how successfully the festival was run as an event as I also attended some panels and talks while I was there.