Films
Films Showing at Keswick Film Festival
The World is Big and Salvation Lurks Around the Corner is a multiple award-winner on the festival circuit starring Miki Manojlovic as Bai Dan, whose grandson Alex's first cry coincided with his grandfather's crowning as 'king of backgammon'. Now, 30 years on, Alex has lost his memory. Doctors give little hope of recovery but Bai Dan has other, eccentric ideas. Through the game of backgammon, and a quest by tandem across Europe back to their native Bulgaria, the younger man learns about the past and rediscovers who he is. Thanks to the Director
The story of a white farmer who took the unprecedented step of challenging Robert Mugabe before the SADC (South African Development Community) international court, charging him and his government with racial discrimination and of violations of Human Rights.This film is an intimate account of one family’s astonishing bravery in the face of brutality, in a fight to protect their property. This is the only documentary feature film to have come out of Zimbabwe in recent years, where a total press ban still exists. Mugabe and the White African is perhaps the outside world’s only real glimpse of what it is like to live inside Mugabe’s Zimbabwe.
Winner of the Guardian First Film Award 2009 and the FIPRESCI Prize at the London Film Festival Joanna Hogg’s first film is described by Anton Bitel as ‘a subtle drama addressed at the teenager still vacationing in every adult’. Anna, a childless fortysomething goes to join her old school friend Verena, her husband and their three adolescent children for a holiday in the Italian countryside. George is there, with his son. The only person missing is Anna’s husband, supposedly absent because of work although Anna’s regular phone conversations with him reveal greater frictions between them. With its lingering wide shots and natural soundtrack, Unrelated is unreservedly an adult film, eschewing fancy special effects or wild narrative leaps for character drama.
Thanks to the director.
A woman in a desolate central European landscape sets off to seek out, and take her revenge on, her rapist of many years ago. So far, so indie cinema. The surprise is that a British writer-director, Peter Strickland, has so immersed himself in the concept and the landscape that he's created a festival hit, winner of the Silver Berlin Bear. Fine cinematography and a strong central performance by the previously unknown Hilda Peter serve him well. As for the widely-praised sound - '...an other-worldly score, part choral, part electronic, by Steven Stapleton and Geoff Cox, and a genuinely enigmatic sound design....a powerful, unsettling film.' (Jonathan Romney, Independent) Thanks to Artificial Eye
In 1950’s South Africa, apartheid is just beginning. Free-spirited Amina has broken all the rules of her own conventional Indian community in South Africa by running a cafe, a ‘grey area’ for those who fall outside the strict ‘black and white’ rules of the apartheid-led government. Long accustomed to the racial barriers of the country and its new laws, Madeleine and Jacob share a budding attraction. Miriam, on the other hand, is a doting mother to her children and a demure and subservient wife to her chauvinistic, frustrated husband, Omar. Quietly intelligent, Miriam has never assumed that she may have choices in life. When Miriam meets Amina, their unexpected attraction throws them both off balance. Winner of 21 festival awards. Thanks to Enlightenment Productions.
A dark romantic fairytale about a young woman, ‘Clara’, who is involved in a car crash with her husband, ‘Morten’. As she wakes up in her partial sighted state, she realises that the accident has drastically changed their relationship and their lives. Clara spirals into a breakdown, and Morten insists they should move on and start a new life. As Morten tries to get her to understand the reality of how things have changed for them, she experiences flashbacks from the car accident which hint at a hitherto unknown truth.
After twenty years in which a father and son have fallen out of touch, the son returns to his home village in the mountains of Trentino. The profound surprise is that he has a Muslim wife, and a son they are bringing up in the Muslim faith. How will the conservative community react? Intriguingly this was written and directed by a father and son team – Marcello, who has died since the completion of the movie, was well-known in the 60's for religious stories; Dario has previously co-directed a feature-length music documentary about the group Negramaro. This festival prize-winner is a UK premiere. Thanks to the Director
Independent film-maker Kim, for her second feature, travels back from New York to her Korean birthplace. In casting amateurs and working with little script, she gives a new meaning to the notion of a 'child's-eye view': 'Kim essentially gave a few pivotal lines of dialogue the kids would have to say, and then let them improvise, their spontaneity taking over.' (Twitchfilm) The children are abandoned by their mother, treated carelessly by their alcoholic aunt, and have to look out for themselves. Thanks to Soda Films
This documentary was inspired by a trip to Berlin in 2005. When Ian Hawkins bought a souvenir t-shirt with the old East German (DDR) communist symbol on it, he realised he needed to learn about life before the wall came down before he could wear it. So he subsequently returned to Berlin with his camcorder and set about gathering stories from both the East and West. This is a word-of-mouth hit with a host of fascinating interviewees, from the British Communist who worked for the Stasi, to the child of Communist parents who misses the old days. Thanks to the Director
'We wanted to walk the real Africa, beyond clichés of cheetahs at sunset, and colourful marketplaces where you taste strange foods to make people laugh. What we found out is more subtle and sensitive...' The Poussins are amazingly adventurous travellers who decided, starting symbolically on 1 January 2001, to retrace the path of early humankind by walking the entire continent of Africa from the Cape of Good Hope to Israel. Reliant not on sponsorship but on the goodwill of Africans, their epic journey has already spawned three books and a twelve-episode television series. Finally making this movie in English has enabled them to revisit where it began, and the friends they made nearly a decade ago.
Thanks to the Directors
An estimated 2 million German women were raped by Russian troops, 100,000 of them in Berlin. ‘A Woman in Berlin’ is a diary written at that time and published some 15 years after the war’s end. Its author, who identifies herself as a journalist, was anonymous. The book's publication in 1959 inspired outrage in Germany, where the idea of German women cooperating somewhat with the Soviets was unthinkable, and in Russia, where it soiled the honour of the Red Army. It was withdrawn but reprinted nearly 50 years on. Thanks to Metrodome.
'Hopkins has a singularity of style worth watching and the courage not to flinch in putting it on screen.' (Nigel Andrews, Financial Times) This widely-praised first-time director renders the beauty of the Cotswolds in stark cinematic contrast to the ugliness of his protagonists' lives, drawing more than one comparison with the poetic realism of Bruno Dumont. Thanks to Soda Films
Richard O'Barry is a kind of gamekeeper turned poacher. In his youth he caught and trained dolphins for the Flipper television series. Ever since he's been trying to make amends. Here Psihoyos assembles a crew to follow O'Barry to a remote cove in Japan where dolphins are trapped and killed for meat on an industrial scale. Thanks to Vertigo
Five story strands that at first seem like individual vignettes gradually knit together in this witty, stylish ensemble-piece by a first-time director. It's a multiple award-winner on the festival circuit. Group dynamics, the overstepping of taboos and the terrible consequences of avoiding losing face – these cohere cleverly in a cinematically sophisticated whole. 'Offbeat lensing style and quirky humour...the perfomances, by a mixture of non-pros and little-known thesps, are impressively naturalistic and spontaneous. Ostlund has a knack for comedy.' (Leslie Felperin, Variety) Thanks to Trinity
This pseudo-documentary follows a film professor making a film about the criminal underworld, in the process becoming profoundly involved in the company he begins to keep. The approach keeps us cleverly engrossed in the unfolding tale of corruption, while simultaneously reflecting on what we're watching. The film has become a word-of-mouth hit, touted online as leading the North West's New Wave. Thanks to the Director
Twelve-year-old Brendan is a child in a medieval abbey. He's fascinated by illuminated manuscripts and once he's met Aidan the illustrator, at work on the Book of Iona, embarks on a quest for the magical material for the inks. This well-crafted retro animation, with atmospheric music, has won a number of prizes including the Audience award at the 2009 Edinburgh Film Festival.
The director of 4 Months 3 Weeks and 2 Days has steered this project: five tales from the last fifteen years of Romania under Ceausescu, with separate directors (including Mungui himself) and a common theme of absurdism and light comedy. Each is based on an urban legend of the era, from the policeman and his wife who have to kill a pig without waking the neighbours, to the village preparing itself for the visit of the party functionary who never comes. 'Another notch in the country’s film-making renaissance which focuses on day-to-day life under the dictatorship to warm and often hilarious effect.' (Mike Goodridge, Screen Daily) Thanks to Trinity
Experienced TV writer Poliakoff returns to film with a thriller confected from a tale of pre-World War II appeasement among the English ruling class. A fine cast underpins the drama, including David Tennant, Jenny Agutter, Bill Nighy and Julie Christie. 'A far more subversive film than its Brideshead Revisited-style patina of nostalgia first suggests ...Driven by a tremendous performance from Romola Garai...[who] captures brilliantly her character's mix of defiance, incomprehension and, eventually, terror.' (Geoffrey Macnab, The Independent)
Tideland tells the story of young Jeliza-Rose, who holes up with her dad, Noah, in an abandoned Texas farmhouse. After Noah dies, Jeliza-Rose seemingly disappears into a fantasy world in which she talks chiefly to her headless Barbie dolls, romances a disturbed adult and reports home to her dad’s leathery corpse. Gilliam’s films are not for everyone; he describes Tideland as a cross between Alice in Wonderland and Psycho. He also considers it his most tender film. Gilliam and our guest Tony Grisoni worked together on this and many other films over the past years. Thanks to Revolver.
Masahiro Motoki stars as the newly redundant young cellist who returns to his roots but goes after a job advertising 'departures' – which he thinks may be a travel agency, but instead involves him in an entirely different journey, as the person who will strip the dead and make them ready for their funerals. Winner of the 2009 Oscar for Best Foreign-language film, the film's grace and general understatement are a surprise from a director with soft porn in his cv. Its flirtations with the broad humour of 'encoffinment' have puzzled some, but for most reviewers the laughs and reflective narrative make a good fit.
The series of novels by Hiroshi Mori about the Kildren fighter-pilots in an alternative reality was deliberately published in the Noughties in non-chronological order. The complexity of ideas this implies is honoured in Oshii's ravishing anime adaptation. The Kildren fight wars for private companies as adult entertainment in a counter-universe that skilfully mixes retro and futuristic ideas. 'Oshii commented that the societies of highly developed economies have fostered a certain state of arrested development [in] young people...This sense of stasis, cultural amnesia, and immediacy also pervades the consciousness of the genetically engineered, perennially adolescent Kildren fighter pilots...the film is a brooding and densely philosophical exposition into the nature of love, war, memory, aging, and identity.' (Acquarello, Strictly film school) Thanks to Manga
This was Jan Dunn's exciting debut as a director. She followed dogme principles – among them, no special effects, and naturalistic acting – to explore a narrative from three points of view. The life of Helen, a middle-aged woman struggling against her repressive husband Paul to express herself creatively, is transformed by the arrival of Tasha, a Czech refugee. Paul McGann and Chloe Sirene are effective foils and contrasts to the powerful central actor. 'A warm and generous performance from Pauline McLynn...shows she's entitled to put behind her the days of being Father Ted's tea-fixated housekeeper.' (Peter Bradshaw, The Guardian) Thanks to Lionsgate
Four corrupt cops bent on vengeance penetrate the mob's high-rise hideout. But things take a genre-shaped turn when both sides of the law find that they're facing an even greater menace - the horror of the living dead. So police and villains join forces in the ensuing bloody mayhem. This low-budget zombie movie has developed such a reputation on its festival travels that it's been picked up for distribution in the USA and the Far East. At the Leeds Film Festival it out-shocked all the rest on a day celebrating Day of the Dead. Thanks to Momentum
A Kurdish teenager (played by Firat Ayverdi) travels across Europe aiming to join the love of his life in London. But at Calais he's thwarted. How can he illegally get across to England? He decides he must learn...to swim. And so he meets the middle-aged swimming instructor (nicely played by Vincent Lindon) who overcomes his initial prejudices to help the lad, confront his own demons and will perhaps win back his own love. The central tale of the surrogate father cleverly lifts this above the run of exile-and-migrant movies. Thanks to Cinefile
Adapted from a book by Brian Aldiss this is a story of conjoined twins exploited as a pop act. Aldiss recalls the day when the inspiration for the book came from a horrible dream he had when on holiday with his family in Norfolk - the story of conjoined twins exploited as a group. With a script by our guest Tony Grisoni, this film won awards up and down the festival circuit. ‘An intriguing oddity of a film’ says Peter Bradshaw ‘it isn’t right to call it a mockumentary; more a serious documentary about something that did not happen’. Thanks to Pallisades Tartan.
First-time director Venville has tempted an all-star male cast – John Hurt, Tom Wilkinson and Ray Winstone among them – to enact a script from the writing team who wrote Sexy Beast. Will the adulterous Frenchman get his just desserts from cuckolded Winstone, whose friends cheer the avenger on? A fine ensemble performance of a claustrophobic, sometimes theatrical drama, leads to a surreal climax.
One of the great silent movies starring Oscar winner Mary Pickford. It was her last silent movie. As shop girl Maggie Johnson, she works in a five and dime department store where she meets and falls for the handsome Joe Grant, played by Charles “Buddy” Rogers, who is actually working incognito as the store owner’s son, Joe Merrill. My Best Girl was the end of an era for Mary as film was transforming itself from silents to sound. This romantic comedy is one of Mary’s finest movies and played an even more significant role in her personal life as she divorced husband Douglas Fairbanks and married co-star in My Best Girl – Buddy Rogers. Accompanied by the Gardner sisters Thanks to Image Entertainment.
A young man returns to his home years after a violent incident tore the family apart. Shockingly he finds his mother in a local insane asylum. She warns him to run away and beware his dead father. But he chooses to stay, only to find that demons indeed dwell in his family’s midst. Juan Diego Botto, Luis Tosar, and Marta Etura star. An atmospheric horror film that captures the torment and power of artistic production. Thanks to the writer.
Jon Ronson in his non-fiction book with the same title told of coming upon a secret branch of the U S military involved in New Age-style paranormal research. Critical opinion has divided about how successfully this notion, including, yes, killing by staring, has been turned into a fictional movie. The 'crazy comedy of military madness' (Philip French, The Observer) has a high-class cast: Ewan MacGregor, Kevin Spacey and Jeff Bridges are all present and correct.
Morton has drawn wide praise for a film (co-scripted by Tony Grisoni) based on her own childhood. Mollie Windsor is riveting as the 11-year-old girl abused by her parents and taken into care. The camera adopts her point-of-view throughout: physically, at her height and through her eyes; but also emotionally, so that we are drawn into the terrible ambiguities of a nightmare world where the irrational often seems to hold sway. More than one reviewer has spoken of 'the solid assurance of Morton's direction...again and again, Morton created sequences that seemed to contain far more than their visible components. They felt like intense private memories put on screen.' (Tom Sutcliffe, The Independent)
Writer-director Jan Dunn has previously specialized in outsiders and their relation to a community – the eponymous Gypo and loner Bob Hoskins in Ruby Blue. Here she takes a further step on that road by following a novitiate (newcomer Emily Beecham) into a nunnery. The young woman's vocation is seriously tested by an eccentric set of senior nuns, played by a stellar cast including Brenda Blethyn, Susannah York, Amanda Donohoe and Rita Tushingham. Thanks to the Director
In the aftermath of the London Tube bombings of 2005 two very different people look for their loved ones: Ousmane, an elderly African searches for his long-estranged son and Guernsey widow Elizabeth Summers hunts for her student daughter. A piece of photographic evidence links their quests, and slowly a relationship develops between them. Thanks to Trinity
Elliott Jordan plays (to critical acclaim) a young paper-pusher from Basildon with few mates and even fewer prospects – until he accidentally manages to score with the ex-girlfriend (Katharine Peachey) of the local Mr Big. Mayhem follows, and a portrait of New Town England emerges genially between the frames.
This compilation explores the history and legacy of coal-mining through material drawn from the British Film Institute (BFI) National Archive’s documentary and fiction collections. Part of a new series of events about Britain's 20th century industrial heritage, it offers a remarkable insight into an industry which came to define 20th century Britain. Jan Feull of the BFI will introduce King Coal, which will be accompanied by the shorts Whitehaven Whippets and A Cumbrian Adventure - these are a rare and wonderful opportunity to enjoy a very local flavour from the past.
It's 1961. A 16-year-old girl is seduced by a charming older man. It'll all end in tears. But every potentially ruinous cliché on the way is avoided by Danish director Scherfig (Italian for beginners). Instead this is a subtle coming-of-age, and coming-of-the-60's, story. Peter Sarsgaard as the older man is a fine foil for Carey Mulligan, compared by many critics to Audrey Hepburn for her spellbinding central performance. Nick Hornby has crafted a fine screenplay from Lynn Barber's memoir of life before Oxford.
An estimated 2 million German women were raped by Russian troops, 100,000 of them in Berlin. ‘A Woman in Berlin’ is a diary written at that time and published some 15 years after the war’s end. Its author, who identifies herself as a journalist, was anonymous. The book's publication in 1959 inspired outrage in Germany, where the idea of German women cooperating somewhat with the Soviets was unthinkable, and in Russia, where it soiled the honour of the Red Army. It was withdrawn but reprinted nearly 50 years on. Thanks to Metrodome.
Nepal has been through extraordinary changes in the last decade and a half, from reactionary monarchy, through Maoist insurgency, to a fragile democracy where former adversaries rule side by side. As the film's website puts it: 'Filmed over four years during the height of the insurgency and the historic transition of Nepal from a 240-year old monarchy to a Republic nation, ‘Beneath Everest’ is a journey that exposes the grass root realities of Nepal’s ten-year war...Directed by a native Nepali, the film encourages Nepalis silenced by fear to tell their stories, and challenges them to reflect on their fears, triumphs and hopes as Nepal begins the long journey towards peace.' Thanks to the Director
Winner of the Golden Camera Cannes 2009, indigenous director Thornton points his camera at the characters of two troubled teenagers. Petrol-sniffing Samson and artist Delilah leave their homes to head for Alice Springs. Their adventures are bleak, depicted in documentary-like fashion, but with a powerful upbeat conclusion. The director's alcoholic brother plays Gonzo, a tramp who befriends them (and scene-steals with a great rendition of Tom Waits' Jesus gonna be here).
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Shown at KFF 11
London River
In the aftermath of the London Tube bombings of 2005 two very different people look for their loved ones: Ousmane, an elderly...
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