Leeds International Film Festival
Here Comes the Devil
When I spotted Here Comes the Devil (AKA Ahí va el diablo) was showing as part of the Leeds International Film Festival’s horror and genre film strand I was more than a little excited. Earlier this year it screened to audiences in Austin’s Fantastic Fest and to say that it had done well there is something of an understatement: Here Comes picked up awards for best actor, best actress, best screenplay, best director and best picture in the horror category. There are only two explanations for this: either the other films in competition were hardly strong, or Here Comes is really something quite special.
**So of course I had to go and see it. **
Argo
Last night the Leeds International Film Festival kicked off with Argo, which Ben Affleck both directed and starred in. Now, I don’t really pay that much attention to Hollywood projects very often, so I’ll admit that I knew almost nothing about it beforehand, even though it’s apparently big news.
I was pleasantly surprised. Sort of.
Argo has at least two films in it, and at least one of them is quite good. It dithers a bit between whether it wants to be serious or comic, commits to neither and kind of crosses back and forth somewhat awkwardly. The opening, in which the (real historical) Iranian hostage situation unfolds suggests the film was keen to take quite an interesting approach, treading quite carefully in what it did. There does seem to be a degree of sympathy towards both the American embassy staff and the rioting Iranians, neither side being explicitly vilified. The behaviour of the embassy staff, whose first priority when the building is attacked is to shred all their documents, gently suggests that possibly they were doing work that went a little beyond their diplomatic roles.
Leeds International Film Festival
This week sees the return of the UK’s biggest film festival outside of London! Hurrah! I’ve enjoyed lots of pretty great films at LIFF over the last couple of years (and have regularly promised far more reviews than I’ve actually written), so I’m looking forward to some more.
This year I’m lucky enough to be doing some work there - which sadly means I won’t get to see half as many films as in previous years (booo!). So I’m going to preview a few I’m looking forward to (and might actually get to see) here. Over the next couple of weeks I also plan on watching a handful of the festival films I can get my hands on and putting them up here. Obviously these will mostly be the older one - I’m not likely to find a DVD copy of Russian zombie flick Meteletsa, which is getting it’s world premiere here in Leeds - but there should be a few interesting things to watch. My very own festival outside the festival.
Repulsion and Happy People
Three Two more from the Film Festival! Something old, something new, and something informative…
[Bellflower was going to be included in this group… It’ll be coming soon instead…]
Repulsion
Repulsion is early Polanski and definitely ‘classic’ enough that it’d usually fall way outside the focus of this blog: I tend to lean away from writing about the classics, if only because plenty of people have already written plenty of words about these films - what’s left for me to add? So I’ll be brief…
LIFF25: El Sicario, Budrus and I Am Jesus
Ok then! Here come a few more review from the Leeds International Film Festival. I’m currently seeing more films than I can write about, so a review of Fanomonen’s Night of the Dead will have to wait a day or so. For now, here are three documentaries from Monday and Tuesday…
El Sicario
This is certainly not a cheerful one! El Sicario can be summed up pretty quickly as one man in one room talking about the horrible things he has done. In a bit more depth, it is an ex-hitman in a hotel room in Ciudad Juarez, explaining over the course of 80 minutes what his life has contained. With his face masked throughout the film and no props other than a pad of drawing paper and a squeaky black marker, the hitman proceeds to explain the procedures of induction to the Mexican drug cartels and the jobs he had to carry out.
LIFF25 - Convento, Battenberg and Architects of Harmonic Rooms
Aaaaand the Leeds International Film Festival has kicked off. The opening gala of Wuthering Heights was not really the thing for me so, skipping over the first day, my festival started on day 2. There were lots of exciting sounding bits and pieces on today, including Human Centipede 2, Invasion of the Bodysnatchers, 22nd May and The Beat is the Law - Pulp and the Sheffield music scene. I saw…
LIFF25!
Last weekend, the 25th annual Leeds International Film Festival launched its programme, ahead of the festival in November. There’s heaps and heaps of exciting things to look forward to in what is, surely, one of the UK’s premiere film festivals, so I thought I’d do a (very) brief preview here.
The Official Selection is the home of the big names, high-art and gruelling drama but really does host all sorts of things. It’s nice to see the festival score the coup of a whole bunch of UK premier showings of European and World cinema as well as a handful of very exciting retrospectives. Psycho on the big screen is surely one not to be missed and, though I’ve seen them before, Waltz With Bashir and Persepolis are both great and worth a cinema trip. For the more hardy, Bela Tarr’s epic Sátántangó - which is seven and a half hours long! - is screening in the Hyde Park Picture House. Thankfully it comes with two interval breaks!
Huacho
[as these films were all seen on cinema screens rather than DVD, screenshots are much harder to include. I’ll stick to poster/cover images and trailers where possible]
One of my first films of the festival was the Chilean film-cum-documentary Huacho. I describe it as such because, the film is so very ‘real-life’ as to feel as if we are watching the reality of their existence - an idea only supported by the cast only being credited with a single name.
Some time later...
Ok, ok, it’s been a while. This blog hasn’t been updated in faaaar too long.
Not to worry though. Half of the reason for this is that, in volunteering at the Leeds International Film Festival (the UK’s biggest outside London, apparently), I’ve been way too busy watching films towrite much about them!
So, coming very, very soon will be reviews of every single film I’ve seen as part of the festival. Let’s go! Dr Strangelove, Huacho, A Town Called Panic and many many more to come!