AI and Gender Inclusion with Women in Film and TV UK

Raindance talk and discussion at The Canon Venue Piccadilly. Raindance Film Festival continues up to and including June 26 2026 at The Vue Cinema Lower Regent Street. “AI and Gender Inclusion with Women in Film and TV UK,” Panel – Katie Bailiff, Viviane D’Avilla, Katharina Gellein Viken and Georgina Cammalleri AI has been around for a lot longer than people realize and now it has filtered gradually into the mass public sphere and is actively employed more than ever especially in film making and any visual communication including of course, material featured on social media. The title of this well networked and informed … Continue reading AI and Gender Inclusion with Women in Film and TV UK

How secrets come out in a dark story with purple passages and spooky scenes

Jackalope(2026) Raindance Film Festival, The Vue Cinema, Lower Regent Street, London.Until and including June 26 , 2026. World Premiere. Bryce Hirschberg – Writer and Director. Independent horror/thriller. Stars Catherine Corcoran, Alex Mandel, and Bryce Hirschberg. The name Jackalope is a fictional beast – it combines a jackrabbit with the antlers of antelope or deer, rooted in American frontier tall tales and is a good choice of name for this dark film full of episodes to take our breath away. Jackalope indicates myth and mayhem and so the saga unfolds. It’s often fun to be watching a film which starts with … Continue reading How secrets come out in a dark story with purple passages and spooky scenes

34th RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL

RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVALRaindance Film Festival: 17 – R26 June at host cinema Vue Piccadillyhttps://raindance.org/festival/nominees-2026/To celebrate the outstanding films screening at the 34th Raindance Film Festival (17 – 26 June), jury awards are presented to features and shorts. Raindance’s awards system honours features in 11 categories: Best International Feature, Best Documentary Feature, Discovery Award for Debut Feature, Best Debut Director, Best Performance in a Debut Feature, Best UK Feature, Best Director of a UK Feature, Best Performance in a UK Feature, Best UK Cinematographthe Spirit of Raindance Award and new for 2026 is Best Horror Feature. Raindance is BIFA-qualifying for British features. An Oscar® qualifying festival, Raindance honours the work of short filmmakers with 4 awards. The recipient of Best Live Action Short, … Continue reading 34th RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL

Monsters within her…

Costa award-winning, women’s prize-shortlisted author of Unsettled Ground, Clare Fuller’s mystery novel centres on a woman with bearlike features with a grip on reality. Hunger & Thirst begins “All everyone want to know about is the murder and what we did with the body: armchair detectives, tabloid journalists, the curious and the ghoulish, speculating on what happened.” The narrator is a middle-aged woman who, is reclusive sculptor, but most of the story is told in flashback to 1987, 36 year earlier, from the perspective of her 16-year-old self. After a childhood trauma and years in and out of the care … Continue reading Monsters within her…

Job nightmare…

Marcus Kliewer, a writer and stop-motion animator and a  new “titan of the macabre and unsettling” comes a supernatural horror about a young woman who accepts a caretaking job from Craigslist, only to discover the position has consequences far greater- and more dangerous- than  she ever could have imagined. His debut novel “We Used to Live Here began life as a serialised short story Reddit, where it won the Scariest Story of 2021 award on the NoSleep Forum. Film rights were snapped up by Netflix, and it was acquired by Simon & Schuster for publication even before it had been extended into … Continue reading Job nightmare…

Women plagued by brittle relationships

Award-winning novelist, Riley who won a Betty Trask and Somerset Maugham award, and a Windham-Campbell prize worth $175,000, from her analyst’s couch, drills into the gaps between her characters to reveal strained relationships with their parents, particularly their mothers set in north of England or in the US.  Palm House is narrated by Laura Miller, a writer living in precarious life of house shares and freelancing in London. Laura Miller and Edmund Putnam is the deputy editor of a literary magazine called Sequence, who have been friends for a long time whose happy meeting of minds, with long evenings spent huddled … Continue reading Women plagued by brittle relationships

Focus on Parenting

Narrator Sandra embarks on an odyssey through the afterlife to her autistic son, who is literally and figuratively lost at sea: a hilarious and deeply moving voyage of the body and the mind. “It was a strange experience, speaking to someone who didn’t tune in to you. It was like talking hallucinogens” Sandra said. Following a documentary producer who dies and desperately tries to rescue her child while her spirit still roams the earth, Amie Barrodale’s debut novel Trip as much about neurodivergence and the impossibility of human empathy as it is about the bizarreness of the afterlife. Trip is … Continue reading Focus on Parenting

Meaning of Life: ride to infinity

Ferries have a spooky association with death, Charon, an ugly demon employed by Hades as the underworld’s ferryman, picking up the souls of recently perished human beings in his skiff and depositing them in the afterlife, in Greek mythology. In The Ferryman and His Wife by 64-year-old bestselling Norwegian author and winner of the prestigious Brage Prize, Frode Grytten takes readers on an epic journey: Ferry Driver Nils Vik’s last route along the fjord instead of the River Styx, which he must cross to get there “it rumbles and rustles, it whispers and rushes, even on days with no wind”, … Continue reading Meaning of Life: ride to infinity

Moving towards a prize? Well let’s wait and see!

KESHAV SHREE:- FILMMAKER AND QUALIFIED LONDONDOCTOR EDUCATED IN LONDON ITSELF.Aside from doing a degree in Medicine in London, Keshav has also done a one year film course and now he is a mover and a shaker in the fringe genre of making shorts (short films) for competitions! His appealing countenance is evident as he has acted in some of his films. Film is a passion and a hobby.Read on……Of his latest two shorts Keshav told me “They’re both realistic comedies and I like making films on things that affect me as a first generation immigrant.” He has been in England since he … Continue reading Moving towards a prize? Well let’s wait and see!

Don’t give the customer what they want, give them what they don’t know they want yet

Gene Pressman’s memoir of his time working for the legendary New York Department store Barneys founded by his grandfather, comes when the authors helps open its vast new outpost on Madison Avenue in 1993. The luxury store, complete with mosaic floors, custom-made furniture, saltwater fish tanks, a restaurant and floors of beauty, jewellery and clothes. Pressman writes “ The store is amazing. It’s hard to be humble knowing stores just didn’t look like this – not anymore”. Barney’s had, he says, “gone back to the past to the grand  department stores just didn’t look like this – not anymore. Barney’s had … Continue reading Don’t give the customer what they want, give them what they don’t know they want yet