London Film Festival: the end

Still from Free Angela and All Political Prisoners

My festival ended on Thursday, but I shall round up the last stragglers of films seen this week, which includes some crackers.

Probably the best is My German Friend, Jeanine Meerapfel's consideration of a woman's German-Jewish-Argentine identity over three decades. Combining a bit of history, soul-searching and some romance, it works on all levels. I had hoped to speak to the director, but just missed her.

Moving into the realms of black comedy, the Basque film Happy New Year, Grandma had me covering my eyes in horror, as a family seeking to remove its troublesome elder stateswoman unravelled in fine style. I found it difficult to get past the premise that adult children could be quite so selfish, and so laughs were hard to come by, but it's well-crafted. The lead male actor also starred in Ander.

Documentaries were a bit disappointing this year. Canned Dreams I found overly stylised and way too slow. Les Invisibles focused on individuals from the French LGBT community in a way that seemed about  20 years behind the times, although some of the interviewees were impressive.

The standout doc for me was Free Angela and All Political Prisoners, although the title is misleading. Really it's an explanation of Angela Davis's time underground and the ensuing court case that resulted in her release. Not so much is heard about other political prisoners. And in fact it's a bit of a hagiography. Once Davis is released, there follows a triumphant montage of her visiting lands far and wide to receive acclaim as a revolutionary saved from martyrdom. Not mentioned is the fate of her co-accused, whom she cut loose. legally speaking. Nor is there any explanation of how a gun registered in her name fell into the hands of the man who used it in the botched courtroom raid that led to her arrest. Perhaps director Shola Lynch was so in awe of her subject, she didn't press the awkward points. Still, it remains a fascinating tale well-told.

Still from Breaking the Frame

Breaking the Frame features the intriguing life and work of Carolee Schneemann, but is less well-told. Now if the director had just let the artist tell her own story, it would have been fine. But instead there is an insistent, breathless "dramatic" voiceover inserted to read from Schneemann's works that just had me cringing in embarrassment and frustration. The artistic cutting, perhaps echoing Schneemann's collages, is a bit tricksy, but acceptable.

My review of the comedy Celeste and Jesse Forever is up on The Quietus.

And to end with, I didn't see many shorts, but did catch two shorts programmes. Mati Diop, whose work I didn't know, has a programme showing (today, actually) of three shorts. I caught two, both very different in tone and content. Big in Vietnam features two Vietnamese expats wandering the streets of Marseille and experiencing some kind of connection far from home. I found it a bit abstract, but it does capture the dislocation one can feel when uprooted. And then there's Snow Canon. Well, this is a bit of a cryptic psychological narrative featuring a teenaged girl and a baby sitter spending the weekend in a chalet, with a bit of role-playing and sexual tension thrown in.

Lastly, I saw more family drama on show in Blood Is Thicker Than Water, which amassed a range of ideas of family and drama. A family of dogs roaming Cairo starred in the very impressive A Resident of the City, but human beings had their day, too. I was moved to tears by Curfew, in which a recovering drug addict tries to re-connect with his estranged sister via her daughter. And Get Lucky, featuring Ralf Little as the world's unluckiest man, raised a few laughs, too.

To end with, two moments I forgot to mention from the filmmaker tea. One, as I stood waiting to meet my interviewees, a door opened and an older man with piercing blue eyes crossed my path. "That looks like Terence Stamp", I thought, but nobody else blinked an eyelid, so I thought no more of it. But, now I see he does have a film at the festival, and so it probably was the very same actor.

And, lastly, as I consider it my civic duty to spread feminist notions of film far and wide, I am pleased to say that I introduced Kate Hardie to the Bechdel-Wallace test, and very pleased she was to make its acquaintance, too.

Best of the second week:
Free Angela and All Political Prisoners
My German Friend

London Film Festival: how soon is now?

Still from Tomorrow

Right. So, where was I? The festival closes on Sunday, and I have barely mentioned it. Yesterday was an interesting day as I attended a Filmmakers Afternoon Tea, kind of a speed-dating scenario for "talent" to meet press. My dates for the afternoon were shorts maker Kate Hardie and doc maker Andrei Gryazev, two very different encounters.

Hardie's film Shoot Me! is her riposte to the fashion and acting industries, as experienced by her heroine Claire (Claire Skinner) who nervously turns up for a charity fashion shoot and finds her worst dreams coming true as the photographer, renowned for his "sexy" pictures of young women, has no idea how to shoot her and only makes her feel more uncomfortable with his whacky patter and intrusive entourage. It's very funny, and Kate was quite chatty about the backstory to the film and her own experiences in the show biz and fashion worlds.

Then it was on to Andrei, director of Tomorrow. Never have I approached such a full table! I had expected Andrei's translator to be there, but there were also two representatives of Roskino, which is promoting the film in the UK, plus their laptops. I really don't like people sitting in on interviews. It ruins the intimacy for me, and thankfully, they moved to another table. As it was, it was a difficult enough interview, inasmuch as while I directed my questions to Andrei, he addressed his answers to Vitali the translator, who relayed them to me in English. With limited time, it was difficult to get a conversational flow going, and just as he really warmed to the thread, our time was up.  A pity, as I really would have liked to ask more about his approach to the film, which is a doc on Voina, the political art group, or "actionists", as Gryazev called them. I had expected a film showing serious, committed people protesting Putin's regime. What the film showed was three or four rather comically inept people shoplifting and practising flipping police cars, while carting around a toddler in a rucksack. More Stoke Newington than Moscow. Given the opening disclaimer that what is shown may not be reality, it's difficult to say how much was staged, but it was a bit disappointing for me. Even the title was a puzzle, until Gryazev explained at the post-film Q&A that it sprang from the question on everyone's lips ahead of the election: what will happen tomorrow?

I thought that was my festival done, but I was in time for an afternoon screening of Museum Hours. As I had left my festival guide at home, I had no idea why I had chosen the film, until about three quarters of the way through. This has to be the strangest film I have seen at the festival, in form if not in content. Jem Cohen is known as a doc maker, and while the film opens with a woman explaining to someone on the phone that she has to fly to Austria, the subsequent shots seem to set up a documentary. The characters speak in broken, unfinished sentences mimicking normal--not cinematic--speech, and I actually changed my mind a couple of times as to whether it was a drama or a doc. "Can't wait for the credits," I thought. I was puzzled as to why the lead character, a Canadian called Anne, kept breaking into song. And then suddenly it hit me: it's Mary Margaret O'Hara! That's why I wanted to see this film, to see the lost songstress as an actress. So, yes, it is a drama, but performed so naturalistically and shot so documentally, that many will be confused and annoyed. As a meditation on art and set in beautiful Vienna, it has its appeal, but it is definitely a Marmite film.

It is also quite slow-paced, which has been a feature of this festival. Perhaps it's a reaction to the MTV-style cutting and pacing that many decried in the '90s, but I feel this has gone way too far in the other direction. Many, many of the films I watched were glacially-paced and really tested my patience. A case in point: Punk, in which angry young French man seeks his long-lost father while wandering the streets of Paris. And wandering. And going to parties. And brooding. And yelling at his girlfriend. Until one despairs: why is he so angry, and why does it drag on so long?

Or House with a Turret, in which a very young Ukrainian boy takes a train ride that goes on so long, I wanted to throw myself under the train. Yes, he is on a journey and needs to reach his destination, but when half the film seems to be cut-aways of snowy buildings and people sitting outside, one wonders what the filmmaker's point actually was.

Keep the Lights On is a relationship drama in which an annoyingly whispery-voiced filmmaker tries to keep his whiny boyfriend off drugs. "Break up with him already!", I thought, after the fourth or fifth conversation-descending-to-argument. Tedious.

And then there's Tall As the Baobab Tree, which I anticipated with eagerness and was left grinding my teeth in frustration. Two sisters in Senegal fight to go to school rather than be married off in keeping with custom. Should be plenty of room for drama in that, and the filmmaker seems sympathetic to their plight, but again the pacing drags really badly, and the film ends up being a well-intentioned community project rather than a drama.

Still from Like Someone in Love

To end this dispatch on a note of confusion, let's try on Like Someone in Love for size. Abbas Kiarostami's first Japanese-language film, it features a bar hostess meeting a mysterious older man for an assignation outside Tokyo. Ignoring her visiting grandmother's pleading phone messages, she whisks off to meet him in his cluttered flat. An academic, he is more interested in talking than getting jiggy. The next morning he drives her back and witnesses her being accosted by her thuggish boyfriend, who mistakes him for her father and asks his advice. There is comedy in this, but it ends up going nowhere really, because the director is more interested in other things. And the ending is.... I don't know what.

Will give my final thoughts tomorrow.

56th BFI London Film Festival: the story so far

Cast and director of Sister at the LFF

This year's festival has been unusual for me, in that I haven't attended it! Everything I've seen thus far has been on DVD or at a press screening, so for buzz and who wore what, please look elsewhere. Four of my reviews are now on The Quietus site, with at least one more to come. But here are my first thoughts: family drama, animal cruelty and blandness.

To the first, my goodness there is a plethora of family drama, from the fraught "siblings" of Sister, to the squabbling brothers of My Brother the Devil, to the son vs. father conflict of My German Friend, blood is not necessarily thicker than water.

And now to our furry friends: mutilated cats, stabbed dogs, and shot deer--it's quite the gorefest.

Lastly, I have yet to be truly knocked out by any of the films viewed so far. Have I become jaded, or is independent filmmaking seeing a bit of a lull this year? So many of them seem to meander nowhere or lose their impetus. Quite disappointing. But, I remain optimistic. Perhaps I have just not picked the best films. But there is a week to go.

Top films seen so far:
The Wall (Die Wand)
The Central Park Five
My Brother the Devil

LFF: Dendera

If you only see one film about elderly Japanese women bent on a bloody revenge mission, make it this one! Yes, Dendera ploughs its own furrow, turning an intriguing concept into a gory struggle.... against a bear.

Let me start again. Somewhere in a Japan where it is always snowing, village protocol dictates that residents who turn 70 are dumped on a mountainside and left to die. One woman, Mei, refuses to die and slowly builds up a women-only community--Dendera--out of those deemed expendable.

But, Mei's survival instinct is stoked by the burning injustice of being so callously discarded and she wants revenge on her former neighbours, especially the men who dictate policy. This may be an extended metaphor for modern society. Or it may be a needlessly explicit gorefest, as the women become distracted from their desire for vengeance by a bear that wanders into the camp and wreaks terror on it. Not out of any malign intent. But, rather because it's a bear and is hungry.

While it was great to see these women kicking ass, I just couldn't get into the bear hunt and was rooting for the poor creature to escape or join forces with the women. But, no. Lots of blood. Lots of chases. One character asks, "And who won?" Indeed.

LFF: Hackney Lullabies

A quick word about a lovely short showing at the festival. Any film with Hackney in the title takes my notice, but I was not expecting a film from Germany to choose the LBH as its subject.

And what a lovely film Kiyoko Miyake's Hackney Lullabies is. The subjects are mothers with immigrant backgrounds raising their children in the People's Republic. They want their kids to be integrated, while at the same time maintaining their roots.

And they do this by calling on their own childhoods to sing them lullabies and nursery rhymes. The mothers are delightful, sharing bits and pieces of why they live there and their aspirations for their kids. And then they sing the lullabies, in a range of languages that are not English, with the subtitles dancing across the screen. Never has Hackney looked so beautiful. Diane Abbott would approve.

LFF: Journeys

Another day at the festival and another sighting of Diane Abbott. This time the MP for Hackney North and Stoke Newington turned up at a screening of Bernadette: Notes on a Political Journey, Lelia Doolan's precis of the life of Bernadette Devlin McAliskey. I say precis, because as Doolan herself acknowledged, her 88-minute documentary is cut down from three hours.

As it stands, this version covers Devlin's entry into Parliament at 21, her arrest for inciting violence in the Bogside riots and her subsequent involvement in the hunger strikes of 1980-81. It all goes quiet after an attempt on her life in 1981, and her disillusionment with the peace process that led to the Good Friday Agreement was a curiosity to me. I asked Doolan if McAliskey chose not to be involved or if she were excluded and her answer was contradictory. So, let's have that three-hour version to fill in the gaps! Abbott might agree, as she called the doc amazing. One might speculate as to why the MP (who was sitting front and centre, not to the left) might find common ground with an outsider who professed to not want to be part of any club. But, that would be speculation.

Closer to home, I was less impressed with Strawberry Fields, which has its world premiere tonight. Frances Lea's melodrama, a Microwave project, is set on a strawberry farm in Kent and centres on the group of fruit pickers, introduced as being a motley band of immigrants and rogues. That might have been interesting but the focus is actually on a newcomer to the group, the flighty Gillian, who goes incognito as Tammy. The performance by Anna Madeley is twitchy and irritating and when her even more dizzy sister Emily arrives, the irritation levels go through the roof. Emily is meant to be troubled, possibly mentally ill, but as played by Christine Bottomley (excellent in last year's The Arbor), she seems to be channeling Marilyn Monroe, breathy-voiced and flirty. It gets worse, much worse. Nice fruit, though.

LFF: Deep South Drama

Two dramas from South America were among my recent viewing. Hard Labor (dirs Juliana Rojas / Marco Dutra) is a Brazilian dramedy which is part social critique and part horror film, as a bourgeois couple face the dual challenges of starting a business (her) and finding a new job following redundancy (him). Their financial pinch doesn't stop them from hiring a maid, and the three characters orbit each other, illustrating class conflict and thwarted aspirations. The horror aspect is downplayed, serving more as a metaphor for oppressive working conditions than anything else. An intriguing oddity.

Ostende (dir Laura Citarella), from Argentina, is a slow-burning character study of a woman on holiday whose propensity for observation fires her imagination to wild proportions, as she conjures up all manner of explanations for the older man who appears to be squiring two young women. What could he be up to? And has she really thwarted a kidnapping? This is the only film I've yet viewed whose closing credit sequence changes how one views the rest of the film. Still not sure whether I liked it or not, though.

LFF: A Troubled Life

Carol Morley's doc Dreams of a Life receives its world premiere tonight at the LFF. Morley is known for her flights of fancy with the documentary form, but here she reins herself in for a gripping and troubling consideration of the life of Joyce Carol Vincent. Who? Who, exactly, for Ms. Vincent was the unfortunate soul whose dead body lay undetected in her London flat for more than two years.

How did a woman described by acquaintances as beautiful, vibrant, intelligent, ambitious and so forth come to such a grim end, surrounded by unopened Christmas presents? Why did nobody look for her? In search of answers, Morley (unseen and largely unheard behind the camera) placed adverts asking for those who knew (or thought they did) Vincent to come forward, and their on-camera interviews form the narrative of Dreams of a Life, as they offer sometimes contradictory assessments of a woman who seemed to hold herself apart and may have chosen to die alone.

Also mixing the dramatic and the documentary is Shock Head Soul, Simon Pummell's inventive telling of the story of Daniel Paul Schreber, a self-styled mystic who was committed to an asylum in Germany in the early twentieth century. Schreber resisted his diagnosis, explaining that he received messages from God, and he wrote up his ideas in an document that was praised by Jung and Freud, among others.

While Pummell allows the eloquent Schreber his space and displays the brutal treatments he was subject to, the mix of genres doesn't always work. In particular, the use of modern psychoanalysts (in period dress, no less) offering testimony and sometimes addressing characters directly is incredibly awkward. The animation sequences, as well, illustrating Schreber's visions also become intrusive after awhile. Ambitious, but flawed.

LFF: Power, Lies and Corruption

My final instalment from this year's London Film Festival focusses on two very different films that highlight the dangers of the abuse of power.

Sabina Guzzanti's excoriating documentary, Draquila, Italy Trembles, takes as its starting point the devastating 2009 earthquake that led to the abandonment of the Italian town of Aquila. But, as the film makes clear, much of the devastation was due to the incompetence or possibly abuse of power of the country's Civil Protection Service, under the direct control of controversial prime minister, Silvio Berlusconi. Guzzanti's disaffection with Berlusconi is well-known, and she has satirised him on numerous occasions. This film, though a polemic, is well-made and forceful in its criticism of his government's actions or, rather, inaction, in warning the town's residents of impending disaster and then effectively requisitioning the town for development, using emergency powers. The film then delves deeper into Berlusconi's construction background and unsavoury connections. Reminiscent of Michael Moore's salvos at ex-president Bush, the film is by turns funny and very, very sad. Clearly, Guzzanti feels Berlusconi is destroying the fabric of Italian society and her conclusion is not optimistic.

From Draquila to "tranquilo", the much-repeated interjection in Carancho, the latest drama from the Pablo Trapero-Martina Gusman team, he directing, she producing and starring. While I very much enjoyed Lion's Den, another collaboration by the couple, Carancho fell short of my expectations. Starting out as a tense character study of Gusman's ambulance worker and Ricardo Darin's "vulture" (ambulance-chasing lawyer), the film degenerated in the last quarter into an absurd bloodbath, with gun battles and multiple car crashes that defied credulity. A shame. But, it also made clear the insidious influence of crime bosses on the burgeoning compensation free-for-all in Buenos Aires, in which poor people are pushed into staging accidents in return for paltry sums. The Trapero-Gusman message in this film seems to be that inhumanity is only a step away for even the most superficially honest.

LFF: The Kids Aren't All Right

No, I didn't attend last night's Gala Premiere of Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids Are All Right, sadly, but I have viewed several films that detail complicated teenaged lives.

Spork (dir JB Ghuman Jr.) is a quirky US slacker-ish comedy, curiously '90s in feel, with an outsider heroine, bullied at school for being dorky and intersex. Her tormentors include a group of Britney-alikes (very Heathers), while her few allies number the fat Asian kid and the sassy black chick. A bit pat, that, but there is some originality to be had, as Spork (the name cruelly bestowed by the bullies) tries to regain some self respect via the unlikely medium of krumping. An utterly implausible ending doesn't quite spoil the film's charms, grotesque humour chief among them.

Elisa K is much more sombre in tone, its heroine burying memories of a childhood rape by a family friend, until she reaches adulthood and suddenly remembers. Her breakdown quickly descends into bathos, and the ending is left unresolved.

Pretty Girls Make Graves, a shorts programme featuring convention-defying girls, was disappointingly uneven, but, for me, the clear standout was the comedy Release the Flying Monkeys, in which two Albanian girls perform exorcisms among the sinners of London, hoping to bring them closer to Jesus. Laugh-out-loud funny and irreverent, the film punctures religious posturing in engaging style. Most of the other films I found a bit too self-consciously arty to be fathomable, but That Thing You Drew also drew laughs, as an uncomprehending girl causes havoc in her school with her choice of artistic subject. Kids, eh?

LFF: Female Empowerment

A spate of films has focussed on the put-upon woman, the wife or mother who is taken for granted, the servile worker or the discarded woman. Interesting.

Among these is the Argentine drama, Puzzle, in which Maria spends her 50th birthday party picking up after her nearest and dearest. It is only the next morning that she gets around to opening her presents, among them a jigsaw puzzle that catches her attention, with its image of Nefertiti. Perhaps seeking a bit of the queen's power, she immerses herself in the world of puzzles, eventually hooking up with (in multiple senses) another puzzle aficionado. Beautifully shot in rich sepia tones and with a subtle performance by Maria Onetto as Maria, this is a quiet film to savour.

Not so the knockabout French farce, Copacabana, featuring Isabelle Huppert as a boho out-of-work mother beset with an ungrateful snob of a daughter (Huppert's daughter Lolita Chammah) and seeking to make amends by taking work in unlovely Ostend flogging timeshares. The mother-daughter relationship is fraught with perils and Huppert is clearly enjoying throwing herself into various undignified scenarios that mortify her priggish offspring.

Sawako Decides is an odd film, ostensibly a comedy but for the first two-thirds a rather grim depiction of the life of a Japanese slacker, Sawako, who leaves an unfulfilling life in big-city Tokyo to move back to her small village to salvage the family clam-packing business. In tow are her unbelievably dull boyfriend and his semi-mute daughter. The early scenes of Sawako behaving much as a doormat are rather excruciating and one waits and waits for the promised "female empowerment" of the press notes. But.... two scenes very late on are worth the wait. One, in which Sawako rewrites the company song for the female workers to sing, is a moment of cinematic genius and should be excerpted as a music video. The other, the denouement, features much scenery chewing and unorthodox distribution of human remains. Grotesque humour, female rivalry and a rather twee central performance from Hikari Mitsushima make this a tough but rewarding journey.

LFF: The Arbor

Just back from amazing film sort of based on the life of playwright Andrea Dunbar and her writings. The Arbor combines real-life interviews with her friends and family, with readings from her play The Arbor. But it is done in such an artful and moving way, that it is completely gripping. And the story of her eldest child, Lorraine, is heartbreaking. I almost didn't see the film, but am still pondering it several hours later.

LFF: week two

While not what I would call a vintage festival, the 53rd LFF ended on a high note for me, as I made it to the last filmmakers tea, a series of which had been held throughout the festival.

An opportunity for press to meet one-to-one (or, as happened, in clusters) with filmmakers, they are a form of journalistic speed dating, one parking oneself awkwardly at a table with a keen or jaded filmmaker and hoping to come away five minutes later with some insights or at least good quotes.

Well, one of my dates stood me up, one was jetlagged and the other had such a full dance card, she conducted group interviews and then legged it to a screening. But, it was certainly an eye opener. Good scones, too, even if I was not as impressed by them as a colleague who piled her plate high and praised the quality of English food! One certainly doesn't hear that compliment paid often.

Anyway, I was very pleased to get an audience with Shirin Neshat, whose debut feature, Women Without Men, played at LFF. Given events in Iran over the summer, the film, which is set in 1953 as the elected Iranian government was replaced by that of the Shah, is timely and, in some quarters, controversial. Originally several installations, the film draws together the stories of four women, as the country is on the brink of the coup that brings the Shah to power. Despite their varying social positions, they all gravitate to a magical orchard, attempting to find a place for themselves in the face of oppression. An allegory for the state of Iran itself, Neshat's vision is confidently realised.

Wearing the green wrist bands of the opposition movement, Neshat confidently handled questions from six or seven journalists, explaining her position as both artist and activist. At some point, I will elaborate on her comments. But, it was an impressive appearance.

I also spoke to Ana Kokkinos, who had just flown in from Australia as a last-minute addition to the festival. Sadly, I was not able to catch her new film, Blessed, but I well remember her debut, Only the Brave, a tough-minded depiction of Greek-Australian teens. She admitted she was something of a teenaged tearaway and is drawn to these kinds of stories, and the new film returns to this terrain, as it follows teenagers and their parents throughout one eventful evening.

Of the films I saw in the second week, standouts are Precious and Ander, two depictions of home life in very different circumstances.

LFF: French Fancies

When it comes to whimsy and visual imagery, Jean-Pierre Jeunet pretty much has it wrapped up, after Delicatessen, Amelie and, um, Alien Resurrection. Now, in Micmacs à tire-larigot, he's tackling the very real-world subject of arms manufacturers. After naive video store worker Bazil is shot in the head by an errant bullet during a shootout, he finds himself homeless, friendless and jobless wandering the streets of Paris.

But, this is no ordinary quotidien Paris, but a sepia-tinted city of Jeunet's imagining, populated by circus performers and lovable rogues who adopt the down-on-his luck Bazil and assist him in his quest to bring down the two munitions companies responsible for his injuries, his father's death and untold miseries in foreign conflicts. This is a man with a dream, and the means to realise it. There follow ridiculous plot twists and implausible set pieces, executed with Jeunet's attention to detail and cinematic references. There is even a bit of romance between Bazil and a contortionist. And, save for some rather creepy voyeurism involving a security guard, it works.

Mia Hansen-Løve's family drama The Father of My Children is also steeped in cinema but of the business kind, as workaholic film producer Gregoire finds his production company under financial pressures, despite his best efforts. Neglecting his family in Paris, he spends all of his time on the phone, attempting to cut deals all over the globe in pursuit of his vision of the purity of arthouse cinema. The film references feel a bit in-joke, with Gregoire locked in a battle with a Swedish auteur over rising production costs. When it all crumbles, the focus shifts to his wife and three daughters, who find themselves stepping into the breach.

In truth, Gregoire is not a very sympathetic character and the film spends far too much time on his endless phone calls and not enough time developing the female characters who, rather belatedly, emerge. It is only revealed toward the end of the film, for instance, that the wife is Italian, hence her desire to move the family to Italy, against the eldest daughter's wishes. The division into two halves feels a bit awkward, negating the emotional power of the film.

LFF: Week One

Seeing as how I am sort of cheating on myself by contributing LFF reviews to other parties (see Sound on Sight), I thought I really ought to make it up to myself by delivering something substantial to Kunstblog. So, fresh from tonight's Screen Talk with Jane Campion, I can report on the inner workings of an auteur.

Actually, Campion wasn't that illuminating, and, as I haven't seen Bright Star, her latest (the clips I have seen of wan young things quoting poetry to each other didn't really pique my interest), I can't do justice to her comments on that work. Suffice to say, a lot of thought went into the sound and the palette.

Interviewed by festival artistic director Sandra Hebron, Campion seemed a bit nervous and giggled a lot, which was surprising for one of such gravitas. She revealed she still gets anxious in the run up to a shoot--"terror" was the word used, and that her break from feature directing was something of a mid-life reassessment. Once back on set, she couldn't remember what to do! Warming to the evening's task, she told some great on-set anecdotes, including how she handled sniping by junior crew.

She also graciously accepted a DVD from a cheeky actress in the audience touting her wares. Amazing the woman got close, given the burly security men seen guarding the door earlier. The LFF has bouncers now! In fact, I was tapped on the shoulder and informed gruffly that "she doesn't want to be filmed" when I tested out the sound capability on my new compact camera. Funny profession to go into then, isn't it?

Generally, I have found the festival a bit user-unfriendly this year. Not just the bouncers (guarding what?), but the reams of uninformative information, scanners used at the Delegates Centre, rooms closed off for private functions and the refrain of "availability permitting". It feels a bit repressed. Loosen up, film people!

Of course, there are loads of cinematic delights to counter the lapses in presentation. My favourites of the first week are the US indie charmer Dear Lemon Lima, (seen on preview) and Jeunet's Mic-Macs, wildly imaginative, if lacking in logic.

Biggest flop is The Exploding Girl Never has a title seemed so inappropriate, for this treacly slow, monosyllabic slackerfest. Him: Hey. Her: Hey. Him: Hi. Her: Hi. I seriously considered getting up and walking out, I was so bored.

London Film Festival

14-29 October, London

Today sees the opening of the London Film Festival, aka Clooney Fest, as dear George has THREE films on display, including tonight's premiere of Fantastic Mr. Fox. Apparently, the queues have been building all day.

George aside, the attractions of the festival include Sam Taylor-Wood's depiction of the youth of John Lennon, Nowhere Boy, which closes the festival, as well as Jane Campion's latest, Bright Star, a biopic of John Keats and Fanny Brawne.

As usual, though, I am more drawn to the small, obscure films and so am looking forward to the dramas Cracks, Tales from the Golden Age, and Leaving. Blank City was announced, but this doc on CBGBs has now been replaced by another, Burning Down the House. Not sure why.

Jane Campion and Julianne Moore are featured speakers, but I am especially keen to see what transpires at the panel on female directors called Snipping Away at the Celluloid Ceiling, the panellists for which have yet to be announced.

I hope to try out some new methods of coverage, so may be popping up in unexpected places.

LFF: Country Wedding

And to end this year's LFF in style, the Icelandic film Country Wedding would be hard to beat. A laugh-out-loud comedy of disasters about a wedding party on the way to the ceremony, it combines the road movie genre with knockabout farce to great effect. Director Valdis Oskarsdottir has collaborated with her cast on the screenplay, which is sharply revealing of human foibles, and she skillfully uses the device of two separate buses of guests to chart alliances, fallouts and bulging cupboards full of skeletons. It's not groundbreaking cinema but it is very, very funny.

LFF: Cold Lunch

From Norway comes this oddity from Eva Sorhaug. An Oslo apartment building hosts an assortment of domestic dramas, from the abused young wife, to the dissolute young man scrounging for money. The structure is confusing, with a prologue that doesn't seem to tie into the story, which is divided into chapters. Sorhaug stages many impressive set pieces, especially a surreal sequence in which a flock of birds menaces a cafe peopled by the characters. But the ending comes as an anti-climax, and one is left wondering what it all means. Another film which seems to speak to the loneliness that unites humanity.

LFF: Ties That Bind

Ah, the agonies of youth. In Dying or Feeling Better (dir Laurence Ferreira Barbosa), Martial is a sulky French teen who has just moved to a new town with his newly single mother. A loner, he finds it difficult to fit in but becomes fascinated with a set of twins who are also outsiders. Falling in with them, he becomes embroiled in a series of power games that escalates to extreme danger. Quite a well-made film, even if the finger of blame seems to point at Martial's distracted mother (Florence Thomassin) for failing to keep him in check, as if she didn't have enough on her mind.

In 57000 Km Between Us, Florence Thomassin appears again as a flaky mother struggling to keep control of her family, especially her video-obsessed boyfriend and young daughter Nat. Here lives lived online provide a respite from the banality of reality. But it is Nat who recognises the dangers of living a virtual life well before her mother. Writer/director Delphine Kreuter has a sharp eye for detail and the film is a critique of the disconnectedness of modern living, in which people are more concerned about the number of hits on their websites than about the actual people in their lives. Kudos, too, for the depiction of a plethora of relationships, between adults and children and various genders.

The mutual incomprehensibility of parents and children comes under the spotlight in Everybody Dies But Me (dir Valeria Gai-Germanika), in which three Russian girls (see pic) risk everything to attend the school disco. What starts as a semi-comic slice of teen life quickly toughens into an exploration of conflicting loyalties, betrayal and self-destructive tendencies, as lived by teenaged girls. Grim but gripping.

London Film Festival: Black Sea + Down on the Street

This year's LFF has not yet really caught fire for me, unlike last year's which featured some very memorable films. This year one finds a lot of biopics (Oliver Stone's W, Steven Soderbergh's Che, Uli Edel's Der Baader Meinhof Komplex) plus the odd attention-grabber (Quantum of Solace??!!! Why, why, why?).

Anyway, on to a small, European film called Black Sea (dir Federico Bondi), almost a two-hander, really, with Gemma, an elderly Italian widow, taking in a new carer, Angela, who is from Rumania (see pic). Predictably, they start off in conflict and then slowly warm to each other. But, really, there is very little dramatic tension: Angela is just so darned nice from the off, while Gemma is bitterness personified. It's really Gemma who has to make the character journey. The film moves extremely slowly and the last quarter is when things happen, as they travel to Angela's hometown to look for her missing husband. Overlong but with beautiful performances by the leads.

Also viewed: shorts programme Down on the Street, billed as "the lives of young people around the world" but which really should be subtitled: stupid boys with guns. And drugs. The exception was Midnight Lost and Found (dir Atul Sabharwal), a delicate tale of two lonely souls trying to reach out to each other across barriers.