Your chance to help us make a film about Barnet !

Earlier this year myself and Charles Honderick made a small film about life in Barnet in the year 2012. We called it "A Tale of Two Barnets". When we started the project, we thought we'd interview six or seven people and put the film up on Youtube. It was a bit of an experiment to see if you could make a low budget film about local politics that was interesting. Whilst I was born and raised in Barnet, Charles is from from Florida in the USA and knew nothing of British politics, let alone Barnet politics. his motivation was to build his skills as a filmmaker and try and learn the art of documentary making. My motivation was to try and highlight what is happening in Barnet.

To the amazement of both Charles and myself, when we started interviewing people, word spread. The initial list of five people grew into 43 interviews, including Ken Loach. We managed to get funding to pay to hire the Phoenix cinema for the Premier. We got asked to show the film in church halls and civic centres across Barnet. We got asked to the UNISON conference, to the TUC and to the Edinburgh festival. We even got asked to screen it at the house of commons.

And then we got asked to do something else. We got asked to make a follow up film. As we made no money from any of the showing, we had zero budget. One of the kind people of Barnet who asked us to make the film, on hearing that we couldn't afford to make a follow up, wrote out a cheque for £500. We have been doing fundraising ever since. We are now, £1,100 short of the £3,000 we need to finish the film. We have started filming interviews.

We desperately need the rest to pay for technical services to avoid the issues we had with the first film and to cover our travel expenses. We also need to pay a composer to write a soundtrack.

On Tuesday 11th September,, Charles Honderick's band, The Hamptons will be performing lve at Cafe Buzz in North Finchley to raise funds. We'll open the doors at 7pm and it will go on till 11pm.  I will also be appearing, with a fantastic singer, Ms Connie Abbe as the support band. Entry is completely free, but we will be passing around a bucket for donations. Please pop in and say hello, have a drink and listen to some great music. All of the songs are acoustic, so it won't be earsplittingly loud.

We'd really appreciate your support. There is also a protest at Hendon Town Hall organised by BAPS for the full council meeting. If you are attending this, please come down after for a drink with us.