© 2008 Directors Notes. 
Director Tomas Leach joins us to discuss his feature documentary All The Drunken Horsemen, which saw him travel to the isolated Mayan town of Todos Santos in the mountains of Guatemala to capture the preparations for its legendary annual drunken horse race.
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Tomas Leach
3 Minute Wonders
FourDocs
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All The Drunken Horsemen (2007)
High in the mountains of Guatemala lies the small Mayan town of Todos Santos. Each year, on November 1st the town celebrates its legendary drunken horse race.
This film follows Ramon as he prepares to race on the town’s holy day for the first time. He follows 9 days of prayer, preparation [...]
When I’m not working on Directors Notes you can normally find me trying to convince anyone and everyone that they really need a film podcast. CINECITY ‘07 actually listened and set me loose with a mic and contact details for some of their directors, which is how I got to spend the morning in Grant [...]
You’d think that running Directors Notes would mean I spend all my time at screenings and hobnobbing with directors, but the sad reality is that most of my filmmaker contact is via Skype, email and screeners, partially because they live in different countries to me, but more often than should be the case laziness and [...]
Director Phil Grabsky has been working in the film industry for over 20 years, creating documentary programmes for BBC strands such as Timewatch and Reputations, as well as arts programmes for Channel Five. However, I first came into contact with Phil’s work through his 2003 feature documentary The Boy who Plays on the Buddhas of [...]
Escape From Luanda (2007)
In Luanda, one of the world’s poorest and most dangerous places, three students from Angola’s only music school work towards their end-of-year concert. The Music School is Angola’s first and only school of its kind. It houses some 80 students, most of them desperately poor. Many face disapproval and outright rejection [...]
An eight-year-old boy called Mir Hussain, living in a cave in Bamiyan, Afghanistan may not appear to be the most obvious choice for a feature length documentary but producer/director Phil Grabsky’s film The Boy who Plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan uses Mir’s individual story to show how life is lived by ordinary Afghans post-Taliban [...]
As a producer with over 20 years experience in the business Andrea Kreuzhage was well aware of the advice against funding a pet project, but that didn’t stop her from selling her house to finance her directorial debut, the feature documentary 1000 Journals; an exploration in to the 1000 Journals project initiated in 2000 by [...]
1000 Journals (2007)
1000 blank journals are passed from hand to hand throughout the world, collecting stories, pictures, collages — slices of the lives they touch. One came back, filled. Where are the other 999? 1000 Journals investigates their worldwide journeys, and chronicles the self-governed collaboration of thousands of random people who added to this global [...]
BRITDOC, one of our favourite film festivals will be kicking off its third year on the 23rd - 25th July at Keble College, Oxford and are now on the hunt for films to screen in their British Feature Documentaries and FourDocs Short Film competitions. In their own words: “We’re looking for films that [...]