© 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
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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 [...]
Jim Threapleton joins us to discuss his directorial debut Extraordinary Rendition and the challenges of striking the correct balance of tone in a film that depicts the personal effects of a wrongly accused man caught up in a system with little regard for the rights of the individual.
Extraordinary Rendition Materials
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Extraordinary Rendition Blog
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London’s Burning
The Tell-Tale Heart
Amnesty [...]
Extraordinary Rendition (2007)
A man is abducted from the streets of London and transported via secret flights to an unknown country. Held in solitary confinement and cut off from the outside world, he is plunged into a lawless nightmare of detention without trial, interrogation and torture. Returned without explanation to the UK many months later, he [...]
After many years working in the French film industry as an assistant director on over 35 features, Brice Cauvin decided that it was time for him to step out and direct his feature debut Hotel Harabati, which despite (or perhaps due to) problems with financing he managed to complete on his own terms, remaining true [...]
Hotel Harabati (2006)
While waiting to catch a train from Paris to Venice, French couple Philippe and Marion pick up a bag left behind by a polite, vaguely Middle Eastern man. Inside, they find neatly bound bundles of foreign currency; on the tag, it reads ‘Hotel Harabati.’ At the last moment, they decide not to [...]
A few days ago it was my pleasure to interview French director Brice Cauvin about his feature debut, the excellent Hotel Harabati, which you may recall appeared in both Miss D’s and my top ten lists of 2007. I’ll be posting clips from the film and our interview in a few days, but right now [...]
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 [...]