The Compass of Desire Festival

Enter the Compass den of desire, a world of libidinous lovin’,

romantic encounters, sordid, sexy, beautiful and beastly!
We explore our theme through the rose-tinted corridors of
nostalgia, up the dizzy heights of aspiration, plummeting
finally to the murky underbelly of the dark sides of impulse
and desire. Through a series of encounters, performances
and film screenings artists, magicians, performers and
academics will come together.
Using the directional points of the compass to navigate our
way across the globe, the programme will take us from a

The Com
sexy French burlesque cabaret to the island of Cuba, then
to the seedy depths of an American speakeasy, before
arriving in the country of Lebanon. Come, join the fun,
and taste the treats within!

Compass Film CIC is a volunteer-run, not-for-profit Community Interest

Company committed to grassroots programming that is born out of
collaboration. We aim to programme exciting and interactive encounters that
challenge our audiences to experience diverse forms of art and culture, and
that widen participation in the arts by recruiting new audiences to get involved!

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 Other Festival Events
Festival Programme Rhymes Spoken Word Event
Sat 3 Oct : £5/ £4 : 20.00h (Doors 19.30h)
Sat 3 Oct St Werburgh’s City Farm Café
Rhymes Spoken Word 20.00h Rhymes brings you an evening of live spoken word
and poetry from some of Bristol’s finest wordsmiths,
Fri 9 Oct plus London-based lyricist Kate Tempest. Also on
the bill, open mic spot to entice Bristol’s budding
Launch Party 20.00h rhymers into the limelight. Food and drink provided by
The Runcible Spoon. To register for the open mic email
Sat 10 Oct tara@compass-film.co.uk, or register on the night.
Compass North (France) 19.30h
Trinity Launch Party
Sun 11 Oct

mpass
Fri 9 Oct : Free Entry : 20.00h
Compass South (Cuba) 18.30h
The Compass Festival at Trinity kicks off with a right old
knees up! Come and help us celebrate! Take this opportunity
Sat 17 Oct to see what has been bubbling away behind the doors of
Compass West (America) 19.30h desire. Sample snippets of the rest of the fest with bands,
DJs, wandering performances, art, film and installations…
Sun 18 Oct Kick back, step up, and enjoy the ride!
Compass East (Lebanon) 18.30h
Five Minutes of Fire–
Sat 24 Oct Short Film Competition
Five Minutes of Fire 20.00h Plus Analysing Desire with Dr. Graeme McGrath
Sat 24 Oct : £5/ £4 : 20.00h (Doors 19.00h)
Cube Microplex
A night of five-minute cinematic treats, as entrants to the
Compass short film competition explore the theme of desire in
all its guises. Films will be judged by a panel of experts, with an
audience award for your favourite. Come and fan the flames of
creativity and see what today’s hottest filmmakers have to offer!
Analysing Desire
Graeme is a festival regular, holding forth each year
about psychology, psychoanalysis, movies and his cat.
A psychiatrist and psychotherapist with a longstanding
love of cinema he will briefly review psychological theories
of desire and link them to films in the festival. Erudition with fun!

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 Fra
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Fancy Dress: Burlesque Beauties & Moustachioed Monsieurs
Sat 10 Oct : £5/ £4 : 19.30h (Doors 18.30h)
Grab your feather boas and suspender belts and come on down to the
glittering lounges of the Moulin Rouge for a moustache-twitchingly mouth
watering night of circus, burlesque, dance and cinema. As the lights go
down on this sumptuous cabaret sit back and watch the treats unfold.
Sexy striptease, alluring acrobatics, and captivating cancan all recreate
the raucous atmosphere of the underground cabaret, alongside a
programme of some of France’s most desirous cinematic delights.

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ance
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Films
The following films have been kindly donated by
Institut Français-Ciné Lumière and are all certificate 15:

Les Crayons
(Barcelo, 2004, 3m)
The love story of two children gives way to
a disturbing plot of death and destruction!

Le Baiser
(Le Lay, 2005, 4m)
In the style of 1900s silent film, this little comedy tells the
story of two lovers, torn apart by a broken film reel…

Le Bon Numéro
(Charbonnier, 2005, 4m)
A young lovesick girl seeks her soulmate. Animation.

En Tus Brazos
(Goby, 2006, 5m)
This beautiful little French-made animation tells the story
of the dance of the tango and a couple’s love.

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 Sun 11 Oct
£5/ £4 per film – £6/ £5 double bill
18.30h (Doors 17.30h) Plus live Cuban Salsa
These films have been kindly donated by the ICAIC (Cuban Film Institute). We ask

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you support our gift to ICAIC, of office materials in short supply due to the trade
embargo, by making a small donation either on the event front desk or at the bar.

Memorias del Subdesarrollo /

Memories of Underdevelopment (15)
(Alea, 1968, 97m)
18.30h + Introduction
Sergio, a middle-class Cuban intellectual, decides to stay in Cuba despite his
wife, family and friends joining the exodus to Miami in the wake of the Revolution.
Set historically in the period between the Bay of Pigs offensive and the Cuban
Missile Crisis, Sergio tries to understand the new Cuba and his place within it.
Ultimately cast as an outsider, he ponders the state of his country whilst engaging
in a series of relationships with women. Alea uses Sergio’s relationship with each
woman as a means of approaching a consideration of aspects of Cuba’s own
underdeveloped nature. Using elements of documentary footage of historical
moments in Cuba’s near past, Memories of Underdevelopment was one of
the most sophisticated movies to come out of Cuba at its time, and remains a
cinematically exciting enquiry into a fascinating moment in Cuba’s recent history.

Cub 6
uthh
Fresa y Chocolate /
Strawberry & Chocolate (15)
(Alea, 1994, 108m)
21.00h + Introduction
Set against the faded grandeur of Havana’s crumbling colonial facades,
Strawberry & Chocolate was one of Alea’s last films, and continues to present
a real investigation into the nuances and complexities of the country he loves.
Set one year before the Mariel boatlift exodus, Strawberry & Chocolate is the
story of a friendship between two very different Cubans. Diego is a flamboyant,
cultured gay man and an ardent lover of the arts; David is a serious, naïve Marxist
driven by loyalty to the regime, and intention to report Diego to the authorities
for his counter-revolutionary behaviour. “I knew he was a homosexual,” David
says of their initial meeting in the ice-cream parlour, “there was chocolate, and he
chose strawberry.” But the more time the two men spend together,
the more David’s certainties become effaced. A film about tolerance,
Strawberry & Chocolate examines freedom of expression, surveillance,
and the flaws of revolutionary Cuban society.

Since this film was made Castro has formally apologised

for Cuba’s policy on homosexuality, which is now legal.

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School of Creative Arts
BA(Hons) Film Studies
BA(Hons) Media and Cultural Studies
BA(Hons) Media Practice
BA(Hons) Drama
MA Media Practice and Culture

Visit our website for a full list of art, media

and design courses and open day dates
www.uwe.ac.uk/sca
 applecolour

Top quality colour printers

(based in the South-West)
www.applecolour.co.uk
We
America
Fancy Dress: Gangsters & Molls
Sat 17 Oct : £5/ £4 : 19.30h (Doors 18.30h)
This event is presented in partnership with
Bristol Silents and Watershed
In the seedy cellars and back allies of 1920s America,
gangsters and molls gather in town’s hottest speakeasy
where the Madame, matriarch of the house, waits to
welcome her guests, including some of the hood’s most
notorious characters… Roxanne props up the bar, as the
local mobsters gamble at a table in the corner…
On the bill tonight are dancers, singers, magicians and
circus performers as well as one of America’s most intriguing
prohibition-era pieces of silent cinema. The live piano
accompaniment will extend to performances and acts
on this most electric of evenings… A slick night out
in the city was never so enticing!

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 The Unknown
(Browning, 1927, 62m)
With live piano accompaniment from John Sweeney
In this typically bizarre Lon Chaney/Tod Browning
collaboration Chaney plays an armless knife-thrower (Alonso)

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who is infatuated with beautiful bareback-riding carnival
girl, Estrella (played by the very young Joan Crawford).
Using his feet to perform a circus knife-throwing act
Alonso masquerades as armless only to evade the law.
However, on discovering Estrella’s fear of being touched
by men Alonso – desire-crazed and love-blind – decides
to have his arms amputated in an attempt to win her heart,
with devastating consequences… One of the great silent
movies, astonishing in its intensity and unrivalled in the
twenties for its exploration of dark-side of human
emotion, The Unknown is a remarkably perverse
and brilliant tale of passion, lust and obsession.
John Sweeney started playing for silent movies in 1990
at Riverside Studios Cinema in London and has since
played many places including the National Film Theatre,
the Barbican Cinema, Nottingham Broadway and the
Cambridge Film Festival. Playing at the Giornate in Italy
since 2000, he has also worked extensively in the field of
contemporary dance, both as a composer and a pianist.
www.bristolsilents.org.uk

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 Sun 18 Oct

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£5/ £4 per film – £6/ £5 double bill
18.30h (Doors 17.30h)
Plus Leba-knees-up with live music!

Sukkar Banat /
Caramel (PG)
(Labaki, 2007, 95m)
18.30h + Introduction
Set in a beauty salon in modern-day Beirut, Caramel is a
heartwarming romantic comedy about a group of Lebanese
women whose respective turmoils in love and life are borne
through the friendship that binds them. Caught between the
traditions and expectations of an older Lebanon (represented
by their parents and family homes) and the realities and
contradictions of a new modern age, they are all in some
sense at a turning point. On the cusp of change, the women
face different futures each, alone, but in the company of
those they love most.

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astt
Vals Im Bashir /
Waltz with Bashir (18)
(Folman, 2008, 90m)
21.00h + Introduction

Folman’s animation is a beautifully paced, exquisitely drawn

masterpiece using as its theme the 1982 Israeli invasion
of Lebanon. An Israeli film told from the point of view of
an Israeli soldier present in the conflict, Waltz with Bashir
is a starkly honest investigation into memory and the
psychological effects of trauma and guilt on human beings.
Driven by desire to uncover his lost memories of the war
and the part he played, the protagonist seeks out various
other service people that served alongside him. These real
recorded interviews, attributed to the drawn characters that
people the film, lend an honesty to this testimonial of the
realities of the conflict, and can be thought of as contributing
to an understanding of the atrocities wreaked in Lebanon
during this time.

ebanon 13
 Tickets
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Single Events £5/ £4 + b.f.

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Double Bill Films
Tickets available from:
£6/ £5 + b.f.

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Trinity Rd
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Bristol Ticket Shop La

26 Union Street, Broadmead

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www.bristolticketshop.co.uk enc

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0117 929 9008 / 0870 44 44 400 Rd
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Genesis Musik & Clothing

226 Stapleton Road, Easton stS
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Mar
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Tickets available on the door subject to availability
Old Market
Doors open one hour prior to performance start Roundabout

Licensed bar. Hot food and snacks available

courtesy of The Runcible Spoon
Please note main compass-point events are held at Trinity.
Rhymes Spoken Word event will be held at
St Werburghs City Farm Café.
Five Minutes of Fire will be held at Cube Microplex.
For full information on concessionary tickets, ticketing
outlets, venue access, or for translations of film synopses
please visit our website: www.compass-film.co.uk
For information on availability, access or for any
other enquiries please call 0117 902 9554 or
email info@compass-film.co.uk
Festival Venue
The Trinity Centre
Trinity Road, Bristol, BS2 0NW
Walk: Five minutes walk from Cabot Circus and the Bristol
Post & Press Building
Cycle: Three minute cycle from Bristol – Bath cycle path
Drive: Two minutes drive from Junction one off M32
Bus: Number 48/49 from the town centre
The Trinity Community and Arts Centre is a beautiful
large early 19th century church. It is covenant protected
ensuring that solely community, arts and education
events take place within it.

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Sponsors and Special Thanks

Primary Festival Partner

City Farm Café

Company Info
Company Directors / Festival Organisers Tara Sachdeva & Nicky Butcher
Company Directors Sam King & Barney McGrath
Programme Design pleaseturnover.co.uk
Illustration Ben Newman
Installation, Art & Décor Maddie Harris, George Hearne,
Tommy Hickman, Rhys Eggleton
Technicians James Benwell, Daniel Shapley
& Dan Yeomans
Marketing & Press Shankari Raj
Website Design Aneta Gorka & Daniel Love
Catering The Runcible Spoon
Accounts Matt Whitford & Emma Brown
Programme Advisors Kathrina Glitre, Mark Bould
& Birgit Beumers

Special Thanks to…

Paul King, Gill Sandford, Emma Harvey and all at Trinity Community Arts Centre, Ana Cerrato, Rosa Maria Rovira
at the Cuban Film Institute, Agathe Morisse, Chris Daniels, Ada Martinez, Evie Manning, Martin Butcher, Rosie
Armistead, Satish Sachdeva, Leona Williamson, Kate Calvert, Pavan Heire, Sally Butcher, Chuck Warren, Tom
Armistead, Sohail Rostam-Shirazi, Graeme McGrath, Andrew Youdell at the BFI, Ruth Essex at Bristol City
Council, Matty Poynton, Andrew Welton, Corrine Armistead, Shelly Dewhurst, Eddie Sandford, and the Kuumba.
And a final massive thank you to all the artists, performers and contributors who donate their time and skills on a
voluntary basis and without whom the Compass Festival would not be possible.

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www.compass-film.co.uk

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