Cats of Malta Part of the Chagrin Documentary Film Festival Official Selection

A couple of hours ago the 13th annual Chagrin Documentary Film Festival announced it’s line up. It was so thrilling to see Cats of Malta on the list amongst a selection of global films in the International Documentary section. This will be the films US premiere.

It’s been a while since we celebrated or even participated for that matter in large film festivals, (read about why here), but we are glad that Cats of Malta is the film to bring the love for festivals back for us. The family-friendly cat film is sure to lighten the mood, as documentaries are often discussing topical real life issues and social justice events. All we have to offer is a fun cat movie.

NPG can’t wait to get to Ohio, where we plan to visit or the whole festival and network with the audience and other filmmakers. The filmmakers will also be taking part in a 20 min Q&A after the film screens at 1pm on October 8th.

What we have to look forward to.

CBI Workshop in Basel

On Wednesday we will be jetting off to Basel, Switzerland to fill two director places as part of Robert Marchand's Character Based Improvisation Workshops, which take place all over the globe.

Lucky for us we were funded by the Arts Council Malta though the Professional Development Grant, which is covering a majority of the costs associated with this trip, thus allowing us to learn more improvised techniques for working with actors and developing scenes. We know this is going to be beneficial for us as the way Robert teaches is based on director Mike Leigh's method, which differ from our own process, so we excited about the possibly of utilising parts of what we learn when we direct To Hold the Moon.

Originally we were meant to be attending the workshop early this month in Berlin, but the German section of the tour never went ahead. Thus the offer to attend the Basel workshop from October 31st until November 5th was put on the table. As much as we were looking forward to returning to hip Berlin for a second time this year, we are looking even more forward to discovering a new country and meeting a new group of actors and directors committed to improvisation, plus learning from one of the top teachers of improv in the world, Robert Marchand.

You can find out more about the CBI workshops and Robert as a teacher through his website.