UNLOCKING THE CREATIVE POTENTIAL OF THE HOMELESS The Homeless Film Festival is a new biannual film event and social venture, which screens films made by and about homeless people with the aim of putting homelessness in the media spotlight. The festival, based in Manchester and Nottingham, runs a series of workshops that provide a creative outlet for homeless people to tell their stories through film. As well as showing the films made by the workshops participants, the programme includes feature films that deal with the subject of homelessness. Raising awareness and encouraging public discussion on the issue is especially pertinent considering that the numbers of those sleeping rough in England increased by twenty three percent in the past year. The situation is likely to worsen due to a growing demand for very limited affordable housing and predictions that unemployment in the UK will rise. We recently chatted to Jamie Rhodes, the creator of The Homeless Film Festival. Jamie is forthright and speaks with sincerity; he has a strong and genuine connection to his work and to the people involved in the project. He speaks passionately about the need to give homeless people self-representation and the power of film to effect social change. JAMIE RHODES: There are two elements to the festival really: we do the outreach work and then there's the festival itself.  So the outreach work involves us, Donkey Stone Films, and other filmmakers going to homeless shelters and doing filmmaking workshops with homeless people. And these workshops aren't