Leeds Film Festival Line-up Unleashed
New strands for spiritual cinema, human rights & music documentary
Leeds International Film Festival, the UK's largest regional film festival unveiled today a mouth-wateringly rich programme for 2006, its 20th year. Its a festival genuinely with something for everyone, whether you are looking for films to bombast your senses with gore, to lift you up and beyond the everyday into a spiritual realm, to show you the world as you never see it in mainstream McCinema, or to put a smile on your face with crowd-cheering premieres long before anyone else gets to see them.
Alongside the much loved Fanomenon horror and fantasy focus, the Golden Owl first director award and the UK Film Week; this year's festival sees the launch of Cinema Verso, a vast strand devoted to documentary and unconventional filmmaking; and Devotional Cinema,
a focus on films where cinema appears to move into a spiritual
dimension. With over 300 shorts and features (including over 100 UK or
European premieres) showing over ten days, the £60 access-all-areas
festival pass presents stupidly good value for a line-up that is
simultaneously diverse and with a clear curatorial thumbprint.
The festival opens on November 2nd with four concurrent opening films, for each of the main sections and is a great microcosm of just how broadly appealing the festival is.
The Official Selection starts with
crowd-pleaser Venus from Notting Hill's Roger Michell working from a Hanif Kureshi script. The Devotional Cinema strands presents Into Great Silence (right);
which without music, commentary or interviews, explores the world of
the Carthusian Order of monks in a French Alps monastery. At the other
end of the audio spectrum, Cinema Versa does a sound check with Loudquietload: A Film About The Pixies, which does exactly what it says on the tin. The UK Film Week meanwhile kicks off with Penny Woolcock's Mischief NIght, which sees her working with local girl Tina Crabtree and the producers of Shameless in a life changing tale of love, life and clubbing.
Fanomenon
The geek-out strand famously devoted to sci-fi, horror, anime and fantasy kicks off this time with a three day weekend featuring horror features and shorts from around the world, including five UK premieres. Highlights include the first UK showing of Carlos Martin Ferrera's low-budget psychological kidnapping horror, Hole, which won the Special Jury Prize at Sitges. Isolation, from the UK's Billy O'Brien is bio-terror thriller set in rural Ireland, while Joshua and Jeffrey Crook's Gruesome is a kind of Groundhog Death, as heroine Claire is forced to relive her death again and again. Chris Smith, director of UK horror hit Severance will be providing a festival first by giving a live audio commentary to a screening of the film.
A big highlight is the UK premiere of Satoshi Kon's latest anime film Paprika
which looks at the nightmare world which erupts when a machine
allowing therapists to enter their patients dreams is stolen. Other
anime includes Kill Bill animator Ishii Katsuhito's The Taste of Tea, a magic realist comedy.
Also from Japan is The World Sinks Except Japan, which asks what would happen to the world if the only landmass left was Japan. With whale meat back on the menu, English fast becoming a forgotten language, and Schwarzenegger forced to perform bar tricks to earn money the apocalyptic tale seems a little bit of wishful thinking on the part of director Kawasaki Minoru.
Other highlights include one of the Scottish Screen New Found Land Films, GamerZ from Robbie Fraser which explores what happens when roleplay goes wrong while Brucey Campbell makes a horror comeback with witches and killer trees Lucky McKee's The Woods.
Official Selection
Rolf de Heer's Ten Canoes, the first feature film to be produced in the Australian Aboriginal language and like Atanarjuat, the first native Inuit film, is already being highly acclaimed, having picked up the Special Jury Prize at Cannes.
I have to admit I had no idea Jan Svankmajer was still producing films, but the Official Selection includes his latest feature, Lunacy, described as an Edgar Allen Poe-meets Marquis de Sade world looking at what happens when nightmares become real. Leonard Cohen: I'm your man is part tribute concert, and part biopic and is an essential watch for any fan.
Allen Coulter's Hollywoodland is already tipped for Oscar success a seedy peak under the silver screen, while Abderrahmane Sissako's highly acclaimed Bamako balancing political film with social realist drama. The Last King of Scotland (below left) from Kevin MacDonald, is opening the London Film Festival and is already tipped for awards, while Requiem looks at the reality behind the story which inspired last years' commercial horror, the Exorcism of Emily Rose, who died of a heart attack during an exorcism in West Germany in 1976,
Also of interest is Captain Milkshake, a previously banned psychedelic Vietnam protest film looking at a returning veteran who turns on, tunes in and drops out, and Petr Zelenka's heart-warming Wrong Side Up, about the personality disorder commonly known as love.
In the Golden Owl competition, rewarding first time directors, is Tay Jou Lin's Bardo, a religious allegory exploring the stages between life, death and rebirth; Khadak looking at the fate which befalls a village when a shaman refuses to fulfill his supposed destiny
Cinema Versa
Cinema Versa is at once both problematic and challenging, looking at
documentary and 'unconventional cinema' with three main thematic areas:
human rights, music and 'other' and reflects that massive resurgence of
the documentary as social commentary in the last five years. The strand
is absolutely bursting - what follows is an overview of just the first two
days. Watch this space for details of further highlights.
Beyond Conviction
looks at the process of reconciliation in criminal justice through
mediated meetings between victims and offenders in US prisons - with
surprising benefits. Total Denial (right) looks at the attempts by
Burmese nationals to overturn deals done by western corporations with
the human rights abusing Burmese regime in order to build an oil
pipeline through the country. The Japanese film Little Birds looks at the Iraq war from a few days before it began to 
the middle of the current human catastrophe, while Mexican film No-One follows a group of immigrants from Central America into the USA to a soundtrack of Eduardo Galeano folk songs. Chris Marker, of La Jetee fame (which inspired both 12 Monkeys
and the Terminator) continues the post 9-11 exploration though a hunt
through Paris to unearth the creators of a stenciled grafitti cat in The Case of the Grinning Cat (left).
Holy Trinity church provides the venue for a live performance of John Foxx's Cathedral Oceans
(right) which combines haunting harmonies with breathtaking images of nature and
architecture to create an interplay of image and sound.
Niklaus Geyrhalter's Our Daily Bread
is described in the festival programme as 'the most visually stunning
documentary film you will see this year', which, without commentary or
dialogue explores the huge machine which is our modern food industry.
UK FIlm Week
Leeds Met Film School graduate Mohammed Al Daradji shot his feature debut Alhaam on the streets of Bagdad while the war unfolded around him. Telling of three psychiatric patients roaming the street after their hospital is bombed, Al Daradji and his crew were shot at, kidnapped and threatened with death while making a film which is one of the festival's hot tickets.
Other treats include Ben Hopkins 37 Uses for Dead Sheep (left), Paul Andrew Williams' bleak yet acclaimed tale of child prostitution London to Brighton, Simon Rumley's mother and son tale The Living and the Dead , Chris Cooke's Leeds United shoot Penalty King, Brian Cook's Edinburgh favorite Colour Me Kubrick, and Anthoney Minghella's Jude Law vehicle Breaking and Entering. Dead Man's Cards -
the first film from James Marquand - is a Liverpudlian Western
described as one of the most stylish British films in years. About time
too.
World premieres include Jam, sadly not the film version of the Chris Morris series, but a multi-faceted drama in in a traffic jam, and Scottish Filmmakers the Finniegans' Bits n Bites. There is also the European premiere of Like Minds, the debut film from Gregory J Read.
Devotional Cinema
As an antidote to the frenetic pace and complexity of modern life, Nathaniel Dorsky's films invite an audience to connect at a precious level of intimacy, nourishing both mind and spirit. His camera is drawn towards those transient moments of wonder that often pass unnoticed in daily life: jeweled refractions of sunlight on water, dappled shadows cast along the ground. LFF 2004 brochure
Antithesising the gore of Fanomenon and post 9-11 paranoia and bleak snapshots of modern life in Cinema Verso, Devotional Cinema attempts to connect us to something bigger. Inspired by experimental filmmaker Nathaniel Dorsky's book of the same name the programme looks at cinema throughout history which presents moments 'where our senses and psyche are united and the ritual of cinema seems to be lifted into a spiritual dimension'.
The strand presents its thesis with six classics of the genre including South Korean Ki Duk Kim's
Spring, Summer, Autumn, Winter... and Spring (left), showing the cycle of life
alongside a monk's growing maturity, and shows alongside Duk Kim's
latest film Time; Carl Dreyer's acclaimed 1955 meditation on faith and compassion Ordet; Yasujiro Ozu's 1961 End of Summer, Antonioni's 1962 L'Eclisse, and Robert Bressons' 1951 Diary of a Country Priest.
Victor Erice's The Quince Tree Sun
(left) goes on to explore the act of seeing as we watch artist Antonio
Lopez attempt to paint a quince tree in his garden. Viewers of Stan Brakhage's The Text of Light
describe its frame by frame exploration of the nature of light as the
closest thing to a near-death experience they've seen. Brakhage in turn
described Jack Chamber's The Hart of London as 'one of
the few great films of all cinema', showing here as selected by
Nathaniel Dorsky. Other highlights include collections of films by
Gregory Markopoulos, Dorsky and Phil Solomon.
Other highlights
Leeds Social Centre The Common Place presents a day of political film discussion and celebration under the banner of Empire Strikes Back. The programme on Saturday 11th features Ken Saro Wiwa talking in person alongside his 1995 Last Words on Film. Robert Greenwald's highly acclaimed Iraq for Sale - which looks at the profit companies such as Haliburton have made in Iraq (who can charge soldiers over $100 to do their laundry) and G Ungerman's 2004 The Oil Factor looking at the motives for the US war on terror.
The short film strand, called Shoot, includes the International Louis Le Prince short film award and a host of other shorter treats, with full details to be confirmed on www.leedsfilm.com shortly.
After running a number of events in recent years at the festival (Who Shot British Film? and Never Mind the Celluloid), Netribution is delighted to be an official media partner this year and will be keeping you updated about about plans over coming weeks.
For more info see the festival website: www.leedsfilm.com