Bird's Eye View

Orgasms, slashers and cabaret: Day 5 at BEV 2011

Temper Temper's Wendy Bevan

From luxury sex shop founder Sam Roddick sharing her tips for good orgasms to director Melanie Light explaining that her tendency towards the slasher genre was a natural reflection of her personality, the fifth day of this year’s Birds Eye View Film Festival was a real cracker. We also saw an adventure through the slums of Nairobi, a sharply comic look at post-9/11 New York, and a cracking live line-up for this year’s Festival Party.

Guardian columnist and BEV resident blogger Bisidha hosted a panel discussion for the UK premiere of Liz Canner’s Orgasm Inc. The multi-award-winning documentary provoked outrage and hysteria with its insider expose of the pharmaceutical industry’s desperate drive to commercialise female sexuality In a fiery debate, Coco de Mer founder Sam Roddick declared that ‘Sex is about who i am and how I want to connect and not technique… That’s how I get best orgasms.’

Our Bloody Women programme got into its gory swing with our Horror Shorts screening. Introduced by Paul McEvoy of programme partners FrightFest, we welcomed six of the films’ directors, including Kate Shenton, Jennifer Eiss, Prano Bailey-Bond, Melanie Light, Laura Whyte and – all the way from Singapore – Sun Koh. With topics ranging from Edwardian ghost stories to modern trends in torture porn, host Lucy Bolton voiced the thought on everybody’s minds – if only more women worked in horror, it would be a richer and more varied genre.

Melanie Light, director of Switch and Kate Shenton, director of Bon Appetit

The horror theme continued as we as we headed into our Festival Party, with mashed-up black and white horror films projected around the walls. Decadent jazz-cabaret act Temper Temper headlined, fronted by Wendy Bevan, ending their seit with a hauntingly gorgeous cover of ‘Wild is the Wind’.

In a packed day at the ICA, we also hosted filmmakers Hawa Essuman and Zeina Durra for their award-winning films Soul Boy and The Imperialists Are Still Alive!. We also kicked off our Innovation events with Adventures in Animation and BEV’s first ever Twitterview, with IDFA Digital Storytelling Award-winner Katerina Cizek, director of the interactive documentary Highrise: Out My Window.

To top it all off, we had news that actress Thandie Newton, former Labour leader and MEP respectively Neil and Glenys Kinnock and a host of other stars have just booked in for our Equals on Film: Oxfam Gala Screening tonight! We’re just off to order in some better wine…