Arts Diary: Will Marriott

The cinema, a beautiful old place, is joining Cardiff, Glasgow, Leicester and London to host the first Green Film Festival in May, which will feature a selection of films, documentaries and shorts that highlight climate change and other environmental issues.

Produced by volunteers from Igloo Regeneration and with formative links to the San Francisco and Washington DC environmental film festivals, this pioneering new film fiesta will feature world and UK film premieres along with some new takes on environmental classics. The event runs over the weekend of May 20 to 22. Just one question – how will all the attendees get there?

We might as well copy and paste this sentence: congratulations to York Theatre Royal on further success for its production of The Railway Children.The record-breaking production, which started at York’s National Railway Museum, has travelled to London, this spring goes to Toronto and the latest news is that it’s returning to Waterloo Station, again, this year.

The production will be at Waterloo from June 18 to September 4, giving even more than the 165,000 people who saw it last year a chance to see the show – a show that all started in a subsidised Yorkshire theatre.

Heart-warming tale from The Mill – City of Dreams, a promenade site-specific production in Bradford by the city’s Freedom Studios theatre company. The show is based on real- life interviews with people who used to work in the mills of Bradford. Cast member Raffaella Gordon popped along to Bradford’s Ukranian Centre for research – she picks up the story:

“I sat at the Italian table and started to speak with some of the Italian women. I was really curious about what they could tell me about their arrival in England, because I’ll play a young Italian woman in the show and I needed some information to feed my character. So I asked them a lot of questions and the incredible thing is that most of the women I’ve met are from Provincia di Avellino (the South of Italy) where my grandfather, who was a surgeon, had his hospital. One of them was from the same village as where he was born, Mirabella Eclano. We kept on talking and she said, ‘Oh yes, Rossetti (it’s the surname of my grandfather), they had the house on the main square, I remember’. Suddenly all those stories became very concrete to me.” Lovely stuff.

Impressive dedication to her art from Yukako Sakakura. The Tokyo-based artist was so delighted to have her first show in the North of England, at Harrogate’s 108 Fine Art, that she attended the opening of the show – flying in from her Tokyo home. That’s a long trip for an art exhibition opening.

The worst kept secret in Yorkshire theatre circles is out. John Godber, formerly artistic director of Hull Truck Theatre company is setting up his own company. Godber will officially launch the John Godber company in Wakefield next week.