Alistair Oldham
Position: Senior Lecturer
School: Arts, College of Arts, Technology and Environment (CATE)
About me
Alistair Oldham has a wide range of teaching experience at undergraduate and postgraduate level, particularly in documentary and factual multiplatform production. In the past few years, students that he has tutored have made films in locations as diverse as Cuba, Algeria, Burma, Bulgaria, Brazil and Iran and their films have been regularly selected for London, Glasgow and Sheffield (eight times) International Documentary Festivals as well as for the regional (six times) and national Royal Television Society awards. Students that he has tutored have also won the NAHEMI / Kodak national prize for creative film making and the Channel 4 Talent award for most promising documentary newcomer.
Area of expertise
In recent years Alistair has produced and directed a series of short documentary films, most notably around issues of sustainability.
‘The Bristol Bike Project’ is a short film about cycling, recycling and political asylum. It has been translated into fourteen different languages and has played at over forty film festivals around the world, including in New York, Tokyo, Milan, Madrid, Vienna, Prague, San Francisco, Munich, Seoul, Seattle and Los Angeles as well as at prestigous venues such as the British Film Institute, the Anthology Film Archives in New York, The Barbican and The National Film Board of Canada. The film has also been used extensively in education programmes in the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Estonia, Romania and Georgia, as well as receiving awards in festivals in Germany and Spain.
‘Bonnington Square’ is a short film about the squatting scene in London in the 1980’s. It received an award for Sustainability in Film at the Ekotop Festival in Slovakia, as well as playing at the London and Edinburgh Documentary Festivals, Branchage Festival and The Diversity in Place Festival in Hawaii, and has also been used in teaching and training programmes at the Journal of Neighbourhood Renewal Conference and in the Department of Design Interaction at the Royal College of Art.
‘Invisible Airs’ is a short film about the computerised database, expenditure and power, and follows the progress of digital media artists YOHA in their commission to investigate database visualization from the B-Open programme of Bristol City Council and the Digital Cultures Research Centre at UWE. It has recently screened at the Globians Documentary Festival in Berlin, where YOHA simultaneously headlined in the Berlin Transmediale with their exhibition ‘Evil Media Distribution Centre’.