Firebird A short film written, directed and produced by Kaz Anstee. Filmed during the Covid pandemic lockdown in early 2021, Firebird is designed to be both a standalone short film and to be integrated into a longer drama – Edifice 129 –  which came out of the Creatives Across Borders initiative from the Arc Film Festival in Mainz, Germany. Firebird, the standalone, is my attempt to express the inexpressible pain of being a musician in lockdown. The film is a sonic odyssey that explores complex silences in a world without music and through which I hope to give the audience a way of understanding and experiencing, anew, the emotional importance of music in all our lives.     Linda Gasser, director of the Arc Festival, originally brought together filmmakers from Italy, Spain, Germany, the UK and Malta to spend time talking about film and supporting each other emotionally, via zoom, during the first lockdown of 2020. Over the many months of trauma and lockdown that followed, this group of strangers gradually became friends and eventually decided to work together on a film project. And so Edifice 129 was born –  an experimental film in which each of the filmmakers has worked in their own country to make a segment of a fictional drama that appears to be filmed in one location, at the same moment in time. It has been a huge struggle, in difficult times, and we have had to find ways of getting around the challenges presented by our different directing styles, cultural differences and filming in lockdown. Nonetheless the project is now nearing completion, with the edit currently in progress and the exterior of the  location for our story now being created with the use of CGI. We can’t wait to share Edifice 129 with an audience and also for the filmmakers to finally meet each other in person.