Matt Hulse

Matt Hulse is an artist filmmaker and writer. His films have screened at dozens of festivals and galleries in 25 different countries. He has been nominated twice for The Margaret Tait Award and thrice for The Jarman Award. His work features in Time Out's 1000 Films to Change Your Life (Simon Cropper 2006) and A History of Experimental Film & Video (A.L.Rees 1999). His work is represented in the collections of the National Media Museum (UK), National Library of Scotland, Gallaudet University (Washington DC) The Wallace Library (Rochester, NY) and Fales Library (New York University). Matt is four years into the development of his third feature-length film - The Hippies: Punk Rocked My Cradle (supported by Creative England and BBC Storyville). The Hippies were a bizarre English punk band formed in 1979 by Matt (10) and his siblings Toby (12) and Polly (8). Their cassette album A Sound for the Future featured songs about disease, assassination & The Antarctic. Mixing documentary, fiction and animation the film will explore a time of personal and social upheaval, for the band and their family - set against the wider, unsettled social landscape of post-punk England '79. Matt's second feature length film Dummy Jim (2013) was an Official Selection at Rotterdam International Film Festival where it enjoyed four sell-out public screenings and was nominated for a prestigious Tiger Award (only the third UK film ever to be nominated). It premiered in the UK at Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF), nominated for the Michael Powell Award. Artistic director Chris Fujiwara described the film as "a totally unique mixture of documentary, fiction and playful visual poetry". Dummy Jim attracted support from key national funding organisations Jerwood Charitable Foundation, Creative Scotland, UK Film Council, The National Deaf Children's Society and New Media Scotland. The innovative interactive website dummyjim.com took Highly Commended at Sense Scotland's Helen Keller International Awards. Matt has presented the film at a number of sell-out events including Edinburgh International Book Festival (Unbound), UnionDocs (NYC), The Swedenborg Society (London) and Beijing Bookworm Literary Festival. In July 2014 he toured the film independently throughout Scotland along with electronica duo and film score composers The Twelve Hour Foundation. Film Hub Scotland's first national tour, the project drew capacity audiences, including more remote areas such as Wick, Portsoy and Glenesk. He recently wrote and edited a major book on Dummy Jim entitled I Cycled Into The Arctic Circle: A Peregrination published by The Saltire Society. Matt's debut feature Follow The Master premiered at Edinburgh International Film Festival (2009) and was the second-fastest selling film of the festival: "An inspired cinematic pleasure." (EIFF). The film toured multiple venues in Scotland with Tilda Swinton and Mark Cousin's A Pilgrimage and was featured on BBC R4's Ramblings.