It’s now just under a week until we collate and judge the results of our photography competition to mark the launch of Mike Mills’ Beginners on DVD and Blu-Ray, November 14.

If you haven’t entered yet, you have just a few days to be in with a chance of winning an Olympus PEN E-PM1 Camera Double Lens Kit (RRP £569.99), a medium PEN slim case (RRP £29.99), a 3CON-P01 lens adapter set (RRP £229.99) and an original illustration by Mike Mills himself.

To enter, you just need to upload a photograph that sums up your year to the Beginners UK flickr pool (here) and tag it with the name “BeginnersUK”.

Above are a few of our favourite entries so far – but there’s still everything to play for. Read about the competition in full here.

The links again

Beginners UK flickr pool.
Wonderland’s Facebook Page
The Beginners UK Facebook Page

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Beginners imaginatively explores the hilarity, confusion, and surprises of love through Oliver (Ewan McGregor), a man coming to terms with his father’s death (Christopher Plumber). The film was inspired by the personal experiences of its graphic- designer-turned-director, Mike Mills (read the Wonderland interview here). The film is packed full of stunning visuals, including a series of photographic snapshots – stars, fireworks, trees and graphic imagery – that richly evoke periods in the life of lead character Oliver (McGregor) and his family history.

For the Wonderland Beginners‘ competition, we are inviting everyone to share a photographic memory of 2011, with the aim of building up a bank of images that encapsulate the highs, lows, emotions and events of the past year. From all the entries, one winner will be picked by Universal & a panel of Wonderland editors. The winner will receive an Olympus PEN E-PM1 Camera Double Lens Kit (RRP £569.99) a medium PEN slim case (RRP £29.99), a 3CON-P01 lens adapter set (RRP £229.99) and an original illustration by Mike Mills himself.

To have the chance to win, upload one photograph that encapsulates what this year has meant to you to the Beginners UK flickr pool and tag it with the name “BeginnersUK”.

Keep an eye on wonderlandmagazine.com and the Wonderland
(www.facebook.com/wonderlandmagazine) and Beginners‘ Facebook pages (facebook.com/beginnersuk) to see if you’ve been shortlisted. The winner will be chosen on 14th November.

Beginners features an all star cast which includes Ewan McGregor, Award® Nominee* Christopher Plummer and Mélanie Laurent and is a deeply honest, imaginative and at times hilarious and tender romantic movie that received critical acclaim at the Toronto Film festival.

Remind yourself how deeply funny and transformative life can be, even at its most serious moments when it arrives on Blu-ray(tm) and DVD from 14th November 2011. You can preorder Beginners here.

The post Beginners Photography Competition appeared first on Wonderland.

Director Mike Mills, whose previous work includes the feature-length indie classic Thumbsucker as well as music videos for Air, Moby and Yoko Ono, draws from personal experience in his latest feature length film Beginners, starring Ewan Macgregor and Melanie Laurent.

Based on the coming out story of Mills’s own father’s, Beginners follows Oliver (McGregor), whose father Hal (Christopher Plumber) drops a bombshell that he is dying of cancer, just as he also reveals that he has a younger male lover. Writing and directing the film threw up questions of love, life and death for Mills, who we quizzed about the new feature.

What is your earliest memory of film?

“Herbie The Love Bug”? I also remember being just the right age for Star Wars initial release, all of us boys counting how many times we went to see it, I remember 10 being a common answer. I also remember seeing Saturday Night Fever that same year, 1977, which I wasn’t really old enough for that. And then of course, first year of art school ,1984,  is where i saw all the films that still influence me, 8½ Hiroshima Mon Amour, etc.

At what point did you decide you wanted to begin creating film?

Late in the game, like 27 or 28. Previously film seemed so difficult and complicated and just the entertainment industry. After seeing Errol Morris’s documentary Thin Blue Line and early Jim Jarmusch films I remember thinking, “Maybe I can do that” and  more importantly, “I really want to communicate with people like that.”

You have made music videos and short films – how did you find the transition to making full length features?

It’s the same and utterly different. You learn a lot about film, and crews and people and editing and how to light and how to work and you learn nothing about telling a story for that long and all the amazing complicated political work that goes into getting a personal, artistic, strange movie made in this day and age.

Beginners takes personal experiences as a main influence for your film. Although part autobiographical, how much fictional element is there there?

There’s a lot of “fiction”, they’re a lot of blurring between the two. Even scenes or moments where I’m really trying to make a true “portrait” of my father or something that happened, by the time you write it, cast it, find the new location, etc, you’ve done so much distillation, abstraction, amalgamation, I’m not sure if it’s “real” or “fiction” anymore.

Do you wish that Christopher Plummer were your real life dad?

No. He’s great, but my dad’s my dad!

Plummer famously portrayed Captain Von Trap in “The Sound Of Music” – with your experience of making music videos, would you ever consider directing a musical?

Yes I’d love to do a dogma musical, where all the sound has to be real and live. I’d be more interesting in the dancing that the singing, but I’d love to do that someday.

The rest of the cast are all strong actors – what was the casting process like for the film?

Your  usual  “running for president”  level of meeting and greeting everyone you can to try to get these kind of people. It’s as close as I’m ever gonna get to being the mayor of a major city, or an astronaut, or an ambassador, or a member of the U.N.

Did you have specific people in mind whilst drafting the script?

No, I don’t have anyone in mind while writing – I just end up doing a very bad imitation of them in their last film.

Which scenes of Beginners did you find the biggest challenge to direct?

Nothing really more challenging than others in a way. I love being a writer director, I love being on set, I love crews and actors and dogs, so I was very, very happy during all the shooting.

What is the meaning of love?

Like I know! Just an amateur over here.

Beginners is in cinemas today.

Words: Seamus Duff

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