A montaged wormhole of Lancashire media.
Dirty Faces: An Opening Ceremony is a montaged wormhole of Lancashire media: a pirate television broadcast stitched together from experimental shorts, documentary fragments, discussion programmes, music videos and early internet uploads long lost to the digital ether.
Part excavation, part celebration, but mostly disruption, and curated through a raw, youth-centred lens, Dirty Faces hijacks the idea of cinema itself, asking what film is, who gets to make it, and who it really belongs to. Rejecting traditional hierarchies of cultural value, the programme places amateur alongside professional, the forgotten alongside the celebrated, creating unexpected connections between local histories and contemporary culture.
From broadcast by way of DIY filmmaking, to pre-social-media internet experiments, the screening explores how moving image has always been a tool for self-expression, resistance and community storytelling. In doing so, it uncovers alternative histories of Lancashire, not through official narratives, but through the voices, obsessions and creative impulses of the people who lived them.
Presented as the opening for the Festival’s screen programme, Dirty Faces presents a love letter to Lancashire’s creative underground and a challenge to rethink whose stories are preserved, whose images endure, and how culture is made.