In The Picture

This important event in Manchester on Saturday 19th May features the UK premiere of The Echo of Pain of the Many – the story of how filmmaker Ana Lucía Cuevas learned the shocking truth about what happened to her brother, one of the ‘Disappeared’ of Guatemala in 1984. Lucía is based in Manchester and she will [...]

Aleksandr Sokurov’s version of the Faust story was released in the UK today but I saw it in the Bradford International Film Festival a couple of weeks ago. I have to confess that had it not been in the festival programme at the appropriate time, I probably wouldn’t have chosen to see it as I [...]

How can I begin to write about this Bollywood film? I went to see it because I know someone involved in the UK shoot and the story promised to be set on the West Coast mainline rail route which I travelled regularly in my youth. I’ve seen plenty of Indian films with UK-based sequences and [...]

Le Havre is the third of a trio of top films at Cannes in 2011 to arrive in the UK over the last couple of months – or perhaps the fourth if you include This Is Not a Film alongside Once Upon a Time in Anatolia and The Kid with a Bike. It’s annoying that [...]

Dismissed by David Bordwell because of the “formulaic” direction by Derek Yee, this film from Jackie Chan’s production company is indeed flawed in many ways – but it’s also pretty interesting for several reasons. The narrative begins in North East China in the 1990s. Villagers are discussing the possibility of emigration to Japan, especially as [...]

I wasn’t able to make the final day of the festival on Sunday but a press release reveals that the winner of the first European Features Competition was Volcano directed by Rúnar Rúnarsson, who received €3,000. I’m happy to concur with the judges and this was the winner I expected. It’s a fine film and [...]

Bradford International Film Festival has, for as long as I can remember, regularly included a short before each festival screening of a feature (unless the length of the feature makes this impractical). This is in addition to specific programmes of shorts, i.e. the Shine Short Film Competition. This inclusion of short films in the main [...]

As I watched this film I found myself engrossed but also at times bewildered and definitely disturbed. Toomelah was screened as part of a celebration and exchange between Bradford and Sydney as the first two UNESCO ‘Cities of Film’. My reaction was partly formed around the question of what kinds of considerations went into the [...]

This was the last of the six entries in Bradford’s ‘New European Features’ competition. I don’t expect it to figure highly in the judge’s considerations, but that does not mean that the film isn’t of interest. It’s a mainstream popular film – a form of broad social comedy with many familiar and universal elements. As [...]

For some obscure reason I seem to have missed all the major films of the Romanian New Wave, so I was pleased to get the opportunity to see this film. As far as I can make out, it isn’t typical and in fact seems to be a conscious attempt to create a contemporary version of [...]

Volcano is a recognisable Nordic drama, harrowing in parts and occasionally uplifting – never sentimental, always intelligent. As several trade reviewers jokingly put it, this isn’t a ‘date movie’ – but for older audiences it will ring very true or perhaps start some re-evaluations of family relationships. At the beginning of the film Hannes is [...]

Film festivals are a challenge for writers like me. I generally choose the films I watch after some research, selecting titles because either I think I will like them or because I think they might be important in helping me understand film culture a bit better – including the culture that produces the film. Of [...]

Avé is a teenage girl who arrives at a roadside outside Sofia and starts to thumb a ride. Already there is art student Kamen and he isn’t too keen to have competition. Inevitably though, the two get a ride together and the adventure begins. This is a road movie/romance/coming-of-age drama with a leavening of humour, [...]

I enjoyed Albert Nobbs. I’m not sure what I expected, but overall the film works well. It’s an oddity in the sense that it was shown in North American festivals last year in time for Oscar nominations for both Glenn Close and Janet McTeer and subsequently given a limited release in the US and Canada. [...]

In her introduction Anna Draniewicz, the festival’s Polish consultant, told us that the leading man in this film, Pawel Małaszynski, was the Brad Pitt of Polish Cinema. This suggested that the film might be ‘popular’ rather than ‘arthouse’ for me and so it proved. Grodzisk is a small town in Western Poland and its football [...]

This was the other half of the double bill with Distinguished Flying Cross in the Uncharted States of America strand. At 64 mins this film comes in just below the conventional time length that separates ‘short’ from ‘feature-length’ – and that may be a defining constraint for audiences because this is a fiction narrative that [...]

Screened as part of a double bill of short features, Distinguished Flying Cross is a 61 minute documentary about a US Army helicopter pilot sent to Vietnam in 1965. According to the festival brochure, Film Comment named director Travis Wilkinson as one of the top avant-garde filmmakers currently active. This turned out to be rather [...]

Arrugas is the first of the ‘European Feature’ competition entries that I’ve seen in BIFF 2012. A hand-drawn animation based on a graphic novel by Paco Roca and directed by Ignacio Ferraras, this is an intelligent and carefully structured narrative that packs quite a punch. I managed to approach the film ‘cold’ and I’m glad I did [...]

Is it possible to develop a sophisticated political discourse as part of a hugely funny and very gory zomcom? You bet! – and Juan of the Dead provides the evidence. I never expected to see a Cuban movie in a multiplex but now I have and with Metrodome handling UK distribution (it opens on 4th [...]

My festival got off to a flying start with this wonderful documentary. We Are Poets won the Young Jury Prize at Sheffield Docfest last June. I missed the chance to see it there and at two subsequent screenings in Leeds where it is a local production with enormous local support. I’m so glad that I [...]