Brighton Festival: Brighton – Symphony of a City, Brighton Dome

You have described it all well enough. But you haven't said how dull the Brighton & Hove film sequences were. Thynne  hasn't got to understand Brighton at all, except perhaps as a mish-mash of its obvious cliches (beach life, pier, gay-pride, buses on Western Road, shopping, Sussex University buildings). Pathetic really. How about the very visual and exciting art, textiles and design at Brighton University; people praying at mosques, synagogues and churches; women dancing at Zumba classes or rehearsing choirs; the orchestras, the fringe and main theatres, the Albion football games and crowds; fun the parks; school life; the Royal Pavilion (for heaven's sake!); foreign students here to learn English and find freedom from parents. On top of which there is a huge weight of wonderful archive film of Brighton that this film-maker has failed to find. What a missed opportunity!

I didn't think It would be possible to make a boring film about our raffish city that 'always looks as if it's helping the police with their inquiries' (Keith Waterhouse), but I've been proved wrong. One or two good tricks, like the archive film on the mobile screen, but generally it hardly scratched the surface and, as others have said, nothing about The Albion or the Pavilion, and little about the Lanes and North Laine or of the genuinely eccentrics who live in the city ('Only in Brighton...')

I enjoyed the music but felt the piece over Pride was wrongly restrained when exuberance would have been better

Overall, an underwhelming evening

Firstly thanks very much to Nick Hasted for his helpful reiew of our project. It's hard to get reviews for independent projects so this is really appreciated. Secondly a few responses to your readers who have kindly taken the time to post their thoughts. Inevitably people will have their own views about what they think is important in the city and a 45 min film will  be highly selective and reflect the film-makers' partial view and intentions as well as the time of year in which the film is made (in this case the winter since the film was commisioned in Noevmebr and had to be ready by April) . (Thus not possible for instance to film language students who mainly come in summer). In order to give the film a structure and also to provide different moods and moments for the music ( which the film is primarily made to accompany)  we followed the dawn to dusk structure of 'Berlin: Symphony of a City' and so what we filmed also had to give a sense of different times of day and what one might see at these times including mimicking some of the activites in our original silent film model. At the same time we wanted to introduce some historical elements integrating archive into the day-in -a life-format. There isn't acutally a lot of archive of Brighton that we could afford which isn't about the seafront and the usual places as it was mainly shot by amateurs on holiday - we drew on some of the best sections we could find of this from the wonderful Screen Archive South East who advised us as well as the amzing footage of the Communist Paty from the 1930s.

The Pavilion does actually appear but deliberately not in the kind of shot one usually sees of it. I filmed supporters at Albion but  we couldn't find a way of incorporating it in the end. Permission to film at matches is very restricted as is access to schools for security/child protection reasons. Brighton isn't an especially religous city so we didn't film people worshipping but we did in fact show the 'Rise Up' choir performance in St. Barts. We also, I think, had some effective fottage of the North Laine. We wanted to produce a fiilm which presented some of Brighton's attractions although not perhaps in an expected way as well as highlighting aspects of its more everyday and festive life. We did shoot more of the city's architecture but in the end we thought that seeing the city's people was as important as seeing its buidlings. I agree some more footage of Brighton's art-making would have been nice to get but we did include shows from two key theatres - the wodnderful circus show "Flown" from the Dome and the puppet show 'Touched' from the Marlborugh. we were also interested in how people 'perform' for the camera in everyday life too though. anyway thanks again for coming to see the film!