Guth Gafa Documentary Festival have invited a number of visual artists and filmmakers to collaborate with us on ‘Postcards to the Edge’ – a video art project for our 2008 Festival. The invited artists are all people who attended one of our first two festivals, and they have been asked to contribute a one minute video postcard, made up of any material, telling any story, using moving images, still images, text or sounds – derived from their own shot material, found footage or copyright free archive.

‘Postcards to the Edge’ will be a video art installation that will run in selective venues during Guth Gafa 2008. It will also be part of a website presentation, and a selection of the ‘postcards’ will be shown before our main festival documentary screenings and during our outreach programme. The idea behind ‘Postcards to the Edge’ is to encourage our visual artist and filmmaker friends to create short, quirky, intense video pieces around the concept of ‘the Edge’.

Guth Gafa Film Festival takes place in one of the most desolate, inaccessible but stunningly beautiful spots in Europe. Here in Gortahork, we are at the edge of the edge: the edge of Ireland, the edge of Europe, but at the cutting edge of documentary-making. Cast off here, as we are, at the outer reaches, we have made our own identity, and we want the ‘Postcards to the Edge’ to also have their own striking sense of identity.

The ‘postcards’ may offer insights into life on the edge, whatever that means: they may be personal messages from inside the big capitals where these artists live, they may be poetic evocations of people's memory of being in Donegal, they may be covert missives or overt statements, they may be funny or sad.

All the pieces will be shown as part of our festival installation and on the website. We will also select 10 ‘Postcards’ to show in front of our feature docs.

‘Postcards to the Edge’ is an initiative of Guth Gafa Documentary Festival, funded by Ealaín na Gaeltachta through their Arts in the Community scheme.