With an eclectic programme boasting over 400 shorts and features, this year's Leeds International Film Festival - proudly announced as the UK's largest regional film event - delivered a mixture of delights and disappointments.
Festival director Chris Fell was quick to point out at the Opening Gala that one of the organisers' main intentions this year was to take the festival out of the cinemas and into a host of other venues. This refreshing mantra offered a lesson plenty of other fests could learn from and helped create a number of unique nights out. There were atmospheric screenings in the Holy Trinity Church of Fritz Lang's futuristic
art deco masterpiece Metropolis and his sympathetic portrait of a child murderer, M. Northern nightclub Majestyk hosted an Elvis night, centred around a screening of Marjorie Chodorov's documentary about the Mexican Elvis, El Vez, while local venue Wardrobe offered an evening of hip hop to accompany Kevin
Fitzgerald's Freestyle.
A number of bars and shops ran film-related events, and diverse outdoor projections ran throughout the festival in both the City Square and the new Millennium Square. The majority of conventional screenings were divided between Cardigan Fields' Warner Village cinema, the historic and much-loved Hyde Park Picture House, the city centre's soon-to-be-closed Odeon cinema and the Leeds Art Gallery.
The line-up for the 16-day event comprised a number of unique strands including UK Film Week, African Cinema Focus, Brazilian Cinema Classics, the Louis le Prince Short Film Awards, Fanomenon - which offered cultish genre movies - and Eureka, a profile of continental European features. For those still recovering from this year's Edinburgh International Film Festival, there were many familiar titles on display, including Jean-Pierre Jeunet's lyrical crowd-pleaser Amélie, the atmospheric La Ciénaga (The Swamp), Terry Zwigoff's hip comedy Ghost World, the startlingly original Little Otik, violent Japanese shocker Battle Royale and the spooky Kiyoshi Kurosawa thriller Séance. A number of classics were also dusted down for the occasion, with short tributes dedicated to Henri-Georges Clouzot (Les Diaboliques), Serbian film-maker Emir Kusturica (The Time Of The Gypsies) and British actor-producer Sir Stanley Baker (Hell Drivers).
Such treasures were often intelligently integrated into the programme. Alejandro Amenabar's spectacular new feature The Others, starring Nicole Kidman, was not only accompanied by the director's earlier Spanish-language mystery Abre Los Ojes (Open Your Eyes) but also by Jack Clayton's creepy, creaky period piece The Innocents (1961), with which it shared similarities in setting, scenario, mood and character. The Innocents, which was based on Henry James' popular novella The Turn Of The Screw, sees Deborah Kerr as a Victorian governess looking after two young children who she fears may be possessed. The Others - written, directed and scored by Amenabar - casts an impressive Kidman as a highly strung mother of two, waiting for her husband to return from the war and fearing for her delicate children's safety. In both films, the central performances are first-rate. (Although it is the young stars of The Innocents rather than The Others that particularly impress.)
British (and particularly regional) film-making was, as ever, well represented in the festival. UK Film Week offered screenings of a trio of features from FilmFour's low-budget Lab division. Dom Rotheroe's My Brother Tom is an intense DV drama shot by Robby Müller (Down By Law), detailing the destructive relationship between two teenagers in the Home Counties. British-born NYU graduate Joel Hopkins'
feature debut Jump Tomorrow is a stylish comedy (actually an expansion of his award-winning thesis short Jorge) about a man who falls in love on the way to his own wedding. Gallivant director Andrew Kötting's This Filthy Earth (which was itself shot in the North) is an ultra-original adaptation of Emile Zola's epic novel The Earth and one of the most astonishing, innovative British films of recent years.
John McKay's festival opener Crush proved to be an entertaining enough comedy about repressed sexuality and reawakened spirit. Following the lives and loves of three single fortysomething women, it stars Andie MacDowell as a prim schoolmarm who finds herself enjoying a passionate affair with a brooding 25-year-old organist (cue gags aplenty) to the general disapproval of her contemporaries. Set in a small-town church community, it is for the most part a terribly British affair, full of Carry On-style innuendo and largely stereotypical characterisation. However, MacDowell, McKay (who employs some inventive aural tricks) and a surprisingly downbeat plot twist manage to distinguish it sufficiently to justify its status as an opening film.
Among the controversial treats from Korea offered by the festival's Fanomenon strand were Kim Di Kuk's The Isle and Anh Byung-Ki's Nightmare. Kim Sang-jin's high tempo comedy Attack the Gas Station is a flashy and insubstantial feature that follows a bunch of robbers who take over a gas station for the night, torturing the staff and ripping off unfortunate customers. After a self-conscious, stylised opening and some intriguing camerabatics it quickly becomes tiresome and over-reliant on the same crop of gags.
One of the highlights of the festival's fringe section was the UK premiere of Jeroen Berkvens' A Skin Too Few - The Days Of Nick Drake, an affectionate reflection on the all-too-short life and recording career of the introspective singer-songwriter. Named after Gabrielle Drake's description of her brother, A Skin Too Few uses commentaries from Drake's family and friends to tell his story from his birth in Burma and childhood in Tanworth-in-Arden, to his Cambridge education, career in London and eventual return to Tanworth, where he died from a fatal overdose in 1974.
Disappointments not only included the lacklustre Gabriel & Me and Czech comedy Loners, but also the general organisation of the festival. Metropolis got off to a false start without its organ accompaniment, staff at different venues seemed ill prepared to deal with members of the press, and the eagerly anticipated Mama Africa received a disastrous second screening at the Art Gallery. Not only was the audience informed (at the end) that one of the six shorts that comprised the programme would not be screened, but the quality of those that were shown (blown up from a video copy) could be best described as akin to a pirate copy of a CCTV recording.
Such amateurish antics aside, the Leeds fest impressed with its typically diverse offerings.
