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The Southend Film Festival celebrated its 10th year anniversary over the weekend and continued to show why it remains one of the most prestigious annual events in the UK for filmmakers. Delivering a strong diverse range of independent films specially selected for the festival, it gives the audience a unique opportunity to see films which they would not normally get to see on the big screen.

The festival creates an amazing atmosphere over the weekend with guests and filmmakers interacting by the bar between films. In fact, the only issues I had was the number of great films playing simultaneously, which often left me divided as to what I should watch. But with such a fantastic line up, whatever you chose you knew that you would not be left disappointed.

Following the initial opening gala on Thursday, where they had a special 50th Anniversary showing of if…. (1968), the main film festival lasted for four days.

New Town Utopia is a new documentary from director Christopher Ian Smith, which has been selected to play at the Southend Film Festival on Saturday 26th May. I got a chance to ask Smith a few questions about what his inspirations for were creating the film, why he chose to take a look at Basildon and working with Jim Broadbent.

What can we expect from the film New Town Utopia?

It’s a story of Basildon told through its artists, musicians and creative. It looks at the town’s journey from utopian dream to modern reality, but hopefully does so in a way that is honest, poetic and challenging. The people in the film are funny, honest, but have led tough lives, but they haven’t stopped doing the things they love.

At the very least I hope that through watching the film encourages people to see Basildon and the...

MaryAnn’s quick take… A lovely, melancholy documentary about the planned community of Basildon in England… but really about squandering of postwar optimism with the rise of neoliberalism. I’m “biast” (pro): nothing

I’m “biast” (con): nothing

(what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto) women’s participation in this film

(learn more about this)

Where did the future go? New Town Utopia, the lovely and melancholy documentary feature debut from Christopher Ian Smith, looks specifically at the development and the fate of Basildon, in Essex — just to the east of London — after World War II. But its story is applicable not only to the spate of other planned, experimental towns across the UK, but also to similar projects in the Us, such as the Levittown suburbs. Its story is the squandering of postwar optimism and massive investment in democratic socialism with the rise of the...

In his new documentary New Town Utopia, director Christopher Ian Smith offers an eye-opening account of how greed and political bias played a hand in the downfall of what was billed as one of the greatest social experiments in post-war Britain. The scheme which was hatched by Clement Attlee’s Labour government, came under the 1946 New Town Act which was devised to improve the lives of working people across the country and more specifically in London which was still recovering from the fallout of the Blitz in WW2. Many East End dwellers made the move from London to these new towns seduced by the promise of new homes and better paying jobs, however less than 50 years later most of these towns were left to slowly deteriorate and those who lived in them with nowhere else to turn to.

Focusing the bulk of the narrative on the birth of Basildon, one...

Christopher Ian Smith’s arresting documentary charts the development of the Essex town – and where its salvation lies

Here is an absorbing and heartening documentary portrait of Basildon in Essex, conceived as a super-modern utopian development for the forelock-tugging working classes after the second world war.

The film periodically has Jim Broadbent reading the sonorous words of Clement Attlee’s planning minister Lewis Silkin on the subject of how wonderful it’s going to be. And the odd thing is that Christopher Ian Smith’s film doesn’t fall into the trap of simply making it look horrible. With interestingly composed shots of various parts of Basildon – importantly just the architecture and landscaping without any of the people that could make it look untidy – it does look good, or at least interesting.

Here’s your daily dose of an indie film, web series, TV pilot, what-have-you in progress — at the end of the week, you’ll have the chance to vote for your favorite.

In the meantime: Is this a project you’d want to see? Tell us in the comments.

New Town Utopia

Logline: What happened when we built Utopia? A documentary about grand utopian dreams, the harsh concrete realities of globalization… and some rather angry puppets.

Elevator Pitch:

Basildon, UK: A town with a terrible reputation, failing economy and unhappy population.

It wasn’t meant to be like this… the British New Towns were designed as social utopias, built to create a ‘new type of citizen’ – with homes by progressive modernist architects, job opportunities, green space and a plethora public art.

The characters are a group of funny, complicated artists who’ve led challenging, and sometimes tragic lives. This includes...