Get Your Vine On For Mike Figgis: Oscar-Nominee To Judge Video Competition For East End Film Festival

Vine, the love it or loathe it video app from Twitter, just got a boost of credibility from Academy Award-nominated director, Mike Figgis. The writer/director of “Leaving Las Vegas” has teamed up with the East End Film Festival in London to launch EMERGE, a new initiative focusing on digital filmmaking, the future of film, transmedia and experimental filmmaking. Figgis will introduce EMERGE on July 3 before sitting down to judge entries for a video competition consisting of nothing but Vine videos. Anyone can enter and every entry will be screened at the event before Figgis announces a winner. To submit, simply create a Vine video using “emerge” as a theme and include the #eeff2013 hashtag in your post.

Figgis will also be cutting together Vine versions of his films to screen at the event, including “Internal Affairs,” “Hotel,” and “Liebestraum.” His new film, “Suspension of Disbelief,” will also be screened as a Vine video before making its UK premiere later in the festival. 

“[‘Suspension of Disbelief’] is my first feature film to be shot in the UK in almost a decade and is a true indie production with a 21-day shooting schedule, shot with a Canon on a minuscule budget…I’ve been working within the digital domain for some time now, so I’m really pleased to be presenting EEFF’s new digital strand, EMERGE,” Figgis said. “I look forward to viewing entries to the Vine video competition.”

If Figgis cuts all his directorial efforts down to the six-second Vine standard, the total screening time of the 32 videos would be three minutes and 12 seconds. The director did not commit to a six second cut of “Leaving Las Vegas,” though one would imagine it to be a shorter version of this.