FLUX ONLINE FESTIVAL : From a small idea to a big success.
FLUX is a new moving image platform that brings together artists from diverse disciplines. The platform gives them the opportunity to create new work in collaboration and supports young creatives on working placements. FLUX is supported by Arts Council England & Film Oxford.
The Festival
2020 has thrown a massive curve ball to us all and like most arts organisations we’ve had to put a halt on all our physical project work. However, thanks to an emergency grant from Arts Council England, Film Oxford were able to continue to engage the creative communities by running a moving image festival..online. The FLUX festival aims were to showcase a wide range of creative work from artists, animators, dancers and poets.
Good timing…
The festival ran August-Sept 2020 and it seems we did this at the right time as we received a lot of submissions of new films that had been created during the world-wide lockdown. In these strange times artists have had to adapt to new ways of working and using the medium of moving image as enabled them to express their reflections on the changing world and share their ideas digitally.
Best of the Fest Winner, Joao Bacelar created a gigantic animation of the Coronavirus moving around the empty streets of Lisbon. Van Bui has created a quiet thoughtful visual diary of her lockdown experience, contrasting to ‘Infodemic’ the creation by Derek Curry & Jennifer Gradecki’s in which celebrities and social media influencers morph together spreading misinformation about the coronavirus. Artist Claudia Figueiredo invites us to join her in an alternative mediation film, while dancers Izzy Caterhill, Anna Watkins & the SLiDE project found new locations to film their performances.
We did not envisage that the FLUX Festival would grow to be an ‘international’ festival bringing together a community of moving image artists world-wide. We have had over 70 international artists submitting work, around 350 registrations on Eventbrite and over 2000 views on our Vimeo Channel.
The Awards
On Sept 4th 2020 we held our FLUX Awards ceremony online with hosts Nicola Josse, FLUX founder and filmmaker Andi Reiss.
The winners are as follows:
Best of the Fest & Best Animation : Covid Blues by João Bacelar
Best Lockdown Film Award : Judges Pick : I Lost Myself by Izzy Catterill
Best Experimental Docu: What I Eat in a Society of the Spectacle By Roísín Anderson
Best Spoken Word film : Decoys by Audrey Thevenin
Best Artist Film : The Painting in the Lobby by Mycle Scheuer
Best Dance Film : Knowing Togetherness by SLiDE
We have a lot more great work still available to view online and we will be showcasing a selection over the next few weeks.
FLUX Residency Project.
In our first year 2019, we ran our first pilot residency and created the dance film Mortelle. We worked with film artist Nicola Josse, dancer Anna Watkins and sound artist Nicholas O’Brien. The project also recruited 12 young people on valuable working placements. They were responsible for all the behind the scenes work including social media, production design, photography, creating graphics, technicians and events management.
Follow us on instagram @flux.moving & Twitter @Flux_moving to keep in the FLUX loop.