Sheffield Film Days returns to Amman this week

AMMAN — After “excellent feedback” from the audience last year, Sheffield Film Days returns to Amman this week for the second time, organisers said Sunday.

In addition to the screening of five internationally acclaimed documentary features at the Royal Film Commission (RFC) every day at 7pm, the event will include a three-day workshop for “aspiring Jordanian filmmakers”, British Council Director Robin Rickard told reporters.

Up to 15 filmmakers will be participating in the workshop, which will train them on how to pitch their film projects to the Sheffield Documentary Festival (Doc/Fest), one of the world’s top documentary festivals, according to Abedalsalam Alhajj, training and community programme manager at the RFC.

Sheffield Doc/Fest Marketing Director Sylvia Wroblewska will be leading the training.

Five of these participants will head to the June festival in the UK, where they will be able to pitch their documentaries and network with top international producers and filmmakers, Rickard said.

A committee comprising representatives of the RFC and the British Council — which supports the film days — in addition to an independent filmmaking expert will select the five filmmakers.

“This is a great opportunity for Jordanian filmmakers,” Alhajj told The Jordan Times.

Rickard said the British Council is supporting the film days and the exchange visit within a memorandum of understanding it signed earlier this year with the RFC, under which it will continue to sponsor the film event until “at least 2017”.

The film days opened on Sunday evening with a screening of the award-winning US documentary, “Life Itself”, which examines the life of late film critic and Pulitzer Prize winner Roger Ebert.

On Monday, “The Internet’s Own Boy: The Story of Aaron Swartz” will be screened.

The 105-minute documentary tells the story of “programming prodigy and information activist Aaron Swartz”, who helped develop the basic Internet protocol RSS and co-founded social media website Reddit, according to the film’s distributors, Participant Media and FilmBuff.

“A Dangerous Game”, on billionaire Donald Trump’s golf resort and the ecological cost of similar golf parks, is scheduled to be screened on Tuesday. 

Wednesday will feature “Stop at Nothing: The Lance Armstrong Story”, which tracks down some of the controversial cyclist’s “cohorts and sworn enemies who knew him at the peak of his success to uncover the biggest fraud in sport history”, according to the official booklet.

The film days conclude with “The Last Man on the Moon”, a biography of Eugene Cernan, “one of only three men who were sent twice to the moon, with his second trip being NASA’s final lunar mission”.

Selected by the RFC out of eight films suggested by Sheffield Doc/Fest, the line-up features “some of the most exciting” international documentaries, said Wroblewska.

The films were screened in June 2014 at the Sheffield Doc/Fest for either their international, European or UK premiere, she added, noting that the selected films have not been widely seen by audiences in Jordan.

RFC General Manager George David said the selection is based on the content and quality of the films, while Nada Doumani, RFC communications and culture manager, said the content should appeal to a Jordanian audience.

Copyright is also an issue, according to RFC Project Manager Shadi Al Nimri, who said that the RFC has to obtain the approval of a film’s copyright holders before screening it.

“Sometimes we are unable to obtain the approval and so we can’t screen certain films,” he noted.

Entry to Sheffield Film Days’ screenings is free.