Floating Cinema returns

The UP Projects initiative set sail upon the waterways of east London, and is to return this year with a new design by Duggan Morris Architects. 

The Hackney-based practice won a competition launched in May last year, and was chosen from a shortlist of five international practices including OBRA (New York/Beijing), Nilsson Pflugfelder (London/Berlin) and London’s vPPR.

The design, created alongside artists and filmmakers Somewhere (Nina Pope and Karen Guthrie) will see a collection of ‘extraordinary cargoes’ on board a traditional canal barge, more usually seen as aligned to industry than art.

According to organisers, the ten-week events programme will ‘spotlight the overlooked and ordinary in everyday life and bring to the fore the brilliance to be found on our doorstep’.

It will feature large-scale outdoor film screenings, tours of the waterways, talks and an education project working with local communities to produce an animated film, which will be screened outdoors at a public family fête as part of the summer programme.

Braver canal-farers can take in the London Lost tour. Led by experts in human remains and London¹s burial grounds from Museum of London Archaeology, the tour will explore what lies beneath the surface of London’s waterways. More than just shopping trolleys and rusty cans of Special Brew, we imagine…

More frights are in store at the Horror Weekender, an outdoor two-day event guest curated by British horror director Steven Sheil. As well as screenings of Zombie FX and classic Hammer Horror movies, there will be director Q and A sessions and – get this – a ‘live séance’.

Among the films other being screened are the specially commissioned work  Because I am Mad by director Oonagh Kearney, a film about the River Lea by Michael Smith  and Tim Burton’s stop frame animation Frankenweenie, which will be shown at an outdoor, fancy dress event.

The Floating Cinema 2013 Extra-Ordinary programme will launch at the Open East Festival on 27 – 28 July  For more information and the full programme visit floatingcinema.info.