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The Bradford International Film Festival is typically an underground-friendly fest. This year appears to be no exception with two very special experimental film retrospectives, as well as a few modern underground-type flicks.

The 19th annual Biff will roll on April 11-21 at several locations around Bradford and Leeds in England, including the National Media Museum, Hebden Bridge Picture House, Hyde Park Picture House and other venues.

Biff is hosting a tribute to Stan Brakhage this year by screening the prolific filmmaker’s magnum opus, Dog Star Man, as well as a selection of his short films, from 1963′s legendary Mothlight to 1994′s Black Ice. There’s also going to be an epic-sized tribute/retrospective of experimental films from Austria, a country with a proud avant-garde filmmaking tradition that’s typically overlooked.

From Austria, Biff is, of course, screening two works from one of the experimental film world’s biggest masters,...

Vimeo has consistently been the video sharing site of choice for filmmakers, with their high-quality uploads and file-size permissions that have allowed filmmakers to upload complete, longer-length films without the irritating time-limit restrictions of YouTube.

Now, as of last week, Vimeo has upgraded their Vimeo Plus user accounts to allow filmmakers to upload full 5Gb videos in one shot. That means that Plus users can now upload a full 2.5 hour long feature film in quality HD to the site. As of this writing, this file-size increase is in Beta mode, meaning that not all the kinks may have been worked out yet. A Vimeo Plus membership costs either $9.95 per month or $59.95 per year.

Prior to this change, several filmmakers have already taken advantage of Vimeo’s higher upload limits without time restraints to put their longer films online. On Bad Lit, we tend to consider films over 47 minutes or so...

Embedded above is a simply amazing and fascinating documentary by filmmaker David Fenster called The Livelong Day, about model train enthusiasts. It runs about 20 minutes long and is an intimate, revealing portrait of an obsessive, lifelong-commitment hobby, but with real care given to understanding what draws these men to its lifestyle.

I reviewed the film a couple months ago on Bad Lit and really admired the way Fenster dramatically brings the viewer into this subculture visually. There are plenty of interviews with several hobbyists throughout the film, but those are presented solely as Vo while the camera documents in great detail the work these men do — and they’re all men — to bring to life an enormous train display at the San Diego Model Railroad Museum.

Subcultures are always an illuminating subject for documentaries, exposing us to worlds we aren’t typically familiar with. The Livelong Day is clearly aimed...

Building and maintaining model trains and their tracks is an art form. That’s not something I ever pondered or considered before, but I understand it now after watching David Fenster’s The Livelong Day, an absorbing documentary about model train enthusiasts.

Train modeling is also a lifestyle born out of an obsession. Guys — and they almost always seem to be guys — who are into model trains are also into the real thing and they follow their passion to the exclusion of almost everything else. Fenster opens his documentary with an interview with one middle-aged man who describes having a yearning to fall in love and start a family during his younger years, but his passion for working on the railroad — the real railroad — forced him into a life of isolation and loneliness.

The documentary then ends with a young man, probably in his 20s, who understands what he is...