Pop-Up Jazz Doc shot with a Pop-Up Camera

A short pop-up documentary featuring Dane TS Hawk and his Cop Jazz Festsemble in the 2012 Copenhagen Jazz festival.

In keeping with the pop-up and interventionist spirit of the event, I filmed it entirely on a Go-Pro Hero 2 over the course of 2 days last summer out on the streets of Copenhagen. Additional images of Copenhagen were filmed on the day the world was suppose to end according to the Mayan’s on 21/12/12

The CD Hear We Go  (on Barefoot Records) launches tonight 9/4/13  in Copenhagen

International Mine Awareness Day: April 4th,2013

On this day 5 years ago I was in Baghdad dodging the mortars and rockets coming into the Green-zone from Sadr City with the Football/Mine Awareness charity Spirit of Soccer and their charismatic chief coach (and my good friend) Scotty Lee.

At one stage we actually did wonder if we would ever get out of Baghdad alive as the situation worsened. However, as things turned out it was to be the continuation of a journey that started back in a shell-shocked Sarajevo in the mid-1990s which since then has set out to capture the power of a game people play in-between life and death.

Minefield is an on-going film project about War, Football and Friendship.  Unfortunately not considered to be ‘front-line’ enough by someone who’s sat in a job for far too-long at a certain UK TV station, that’s obsessed with celebrity Chefs, I thought it was now time to give real people a chance to watch the rough-cut and make up their own minds about whether I take the film into extra time and complete it or I call it a day and hang up my football boots and Kevlar jacket on it.

When Professional Respect and Trust disappear from the alchemy that gives you the confidence to believe in your film, then you may as well give up searching for the truth because you really don’t have a story anymore

Thanks to all those involved in getting the story this far: Marie Olesen (Producer) and Berny McGurk (Editor) Thanks also to Mogwai, their people and all the wonderful folk who’ve worked with Spirit of Soccer in Iraq, Cambodia, Bosnia,Kosova, Moldova and elsewhere:

Peace be upon you – Inshallah’

This is what we were doing 10 years ago this week in Glasgow,Scotland as http://www.autonomi.tv

10 years in which we’ve all lost something that’s fundamentally important to us as human beings,let along as film-makers and artists on our journeys through life and death in search of some truth in what we do. Well the one truth we all share now is that we’ve all been living a lie over that time and we’re all losers – even the now rich war criminals responsible for dragging us into an unjust decade of conflict. Shame on them and shame on the silence that’s been deliberately created by a cowardly mainstream media in a space where there should always be noise!

See You in the Next War!

A story of Fear and Loathing in the Caucasus

I wasn’t  quite sure where to place this material as it doesn’t really fit into any of the categories I’ve created on this site – other than existing as fragments and a pilot of sorts for a film that was never made called Pipe Dream (A story of Fear, Oil and Loathing in the Caucasus)

Shot in the late summer 2002′ in the year after the events of 9/11 and between making Bedroom Radio and Good Cop, what’s  here are fragments from material I filmed as part of Thomas Goltz’s Oil Odyssey 2002. In the company of Goltz and a colourful assortment of variously traumatized war-hacks, Azeri Dancers, Moto-Cross champions, Montana Cowboys and Girls and the odd Californian millionaire biker, we followed the route of the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan oil pipeline through the Caucasus region.

The whole road trip was like a cross between a geo-political version of Easy Rider and Fear and Loathing set in the Caucasus. Goltz some day says he might get around to making a film to accompany a book he’s published on the Oil Odyssey adventures. Check it out on Amazon.