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This is the kind of thing they say at the beginning of every festival. Of course, with well over 100 films packed into the fortnight, it is sometimes difficult to discern a theme, although gritty realism seems to the fore from the opening film.
Stephen Frears (High Fidelity, My Beautiful Laundrette), perhaps one of the best-known UK filmmakers, opens with his latest feature Dirty Pretty Things. An urban thriller, with Amelie star Audrey Tautou, it focuses on London’s invisible underclass of easily put-upon illegal immigrants.
Closing the festival fifteen days later, is Thaddeus (December Bride) O’Sullivan’s The Heart of Me, a period tale of repressed love, taken from the novel The Echoing Grove by Rosamund Lehmann, and starring Helena Bonham Carter, Olivia Williams and Paul Bettany.
Among other films likely to figure as sell-outs are Shekhar Kapur’s excellent period remake of Four Feathers, an epic tale of bravery in the face of cowardice as the British Empire comes under threat from dramatic uprisings in the Sudan. The strong cast is led by Heath Ledger, Kate Hudson and Wes Bentley. Kapur takes an intelligent post-colonial line that questions the right of the British to pursue imperialist ambitions.
Roman Polanski’s new film The Pianist starring Frank Finlay, Adrien Brody and Maureen Lipman, is set during World War II and based on a true story about a Jewish musician playing in Poland whilst the vast majority of Jews are being rounded up and taken to camps. It deservedly won the Palme D’Or in Cannes in May.
Peter Mullan’s The Magdalene Sisters which won the top prize at Venice, is an uncompromising study of the brutal regimes to be found in the Roman Catholic institutions known as the Magdalene laundries where young women were regularly punished for certain wrongs. The cast includes Geraldine McEwan (so good in Oranges Are Not The Only fruit), Nora-Jane Noone and Dorothy Duffy. Anyone who saw (and admired) Peter Mullan’s excellent tragicomedy Orphans is sure to be booking a place to see this one.
Then there is rapper Eminem's debut movie, 8 Mile. Loosely based on his life, it is about a white rapper trying to escape his trailer park roots. The title comes from the infamous Eight Mile Road which divides blacks and whites living in Detroit. Eminem has said that he finds it difficult plucking up the guts to watch it all the way through. It's not that it's too violent (apparently it's not). It's that the experience of seeing himself on screen is, he says, "a horrifying thing".
Another subject of the festivals’ famed Guardian interviews is Michael Moore, the thorn in the US Government’s side who is never afraid to ask important people difficult questions. His latest film, a shattering attack on US gun culture, Bowling for Colombine, was given a rapturous round of applause when it was screened before a packed house in Deauville in September, with its targets including the US President and his administration and the Charlton Heston-led National Rifle Association in the wake of the school massacres in Littleton and Colombine. It is very likely to go down just as well in London.
For lighter dramatic fare, you might look to Anita & Me, a bright, rites-of-passage tale set in a Seventies black country mining town about an Asian teenager growing up. Taken from Meera Syal’s first novel, this is sure to attract fans of Goodness Gracious Me and certainly it has some of that famed comedy’s humour running through it. Starring Kathy Burke, Sanjeev Bhaksar, Ayesha Dharkar, and with good performances from newcomers Chandeep Uppal and Anna Brewster, this is a feelgood comedy worthy of being the Morgan Stanley Gala screening.
The Kid stays in the Picture is all about larger than life Hollywood producer Robert Evans famous for bringing to the screen films like The Godfather, Rosemary’s Baby and Chinatown. Co-directors Brett Morgan and Nanette Burstein have really captured the spirit of Evans; furthermore Evans will also be at the festival and take part in the one of the festivals Guardian interviews.
Paul Thomas Anderson’s latest Punch Drunk Love is also likely to be one of the festival’s hottest tickets on the back of Anderson’s much-praised Magnolia. PDL is a bittersweet romantic comedy starring Adam Sandler, Emily Watson and Philip Seymour Hoffman.
Both Denzel Washington and John Malkovich figure in the festival, this time as directors, with Antwone Fisher and The Dancer Upstairs respectively. The former is said to be notable for a great leading performance by newcomer Derek Luke, and the latter is a thriller starring Javier Bardem and Laura Morente.
Blue Car and Long Way Home are US indie films that figured well in the competition section at Deauville, they will be playing alongside Larry (Kids) Clark’s Ken Park which was shown in Venice. Ken Park is showing in a late night slot, as is Roger Avery’s Rules of Attraction taken from the Brett Easton Ellis novel. Steven Shainberg’s erotically deviant Secretary starring James Spader and Maggie Gyllenhaal, is also likely to attract a large audience if only out of curiosity to see what a comedy involving sado-masochism and sexual submission and empowerment really entails.
Of course the festival also shows a great deal of World and specifically within that, European cinema. Amongst highlights are: Lukas Moodysson’s Lilya 4-ever, Patrice Leconte’s L’Homme du Train, from Spain The Other Side of the Bed and Smoking Room, from the Czech Republic, Petr Zelenka’s Year of the Devil, from Denmark, a new and powerful Dogme film Open Hearts, from Brazil comes a sharply comic road movie Suddenly and from East Asia, look out for the Wong Kar Wai-produced A Chinese Odyssey and Takashi Miike’s Dead or Alive-Final, a cult futuristic action movie.
As usual, the festival also includes an Experimenta section, a short films collection, a Script Factory programme at the Soho Theatre, and a touring regional round-up of highlights from the festival which goes later in November and December to Nottingham, Bradford, Newcastle, Bristol, Glasgow, Manchester and Canterbury (in that order).
The festival will be showing films daily at the Odeon West End and the NFT, films will also show for a limited period at the ICA , the Ritzy in Brixton, the Cine Lumiere and sporadically at the Tricycle.
Finally, regulars who come to the festival every year, can breathe easily. Yes there is a Surprise Movie too showing in the Odeon West End 2 at 8.30 pm on Monday 18 November for those that like a real gamble!
RLFF On tour
The tour begins in Newcastle, Bradford and Nottingham from November 22 to 28. It then moves to Bristol, Manchester and Glasgow from November 29 to December 5, before finishing in Canterbury from December 6 to 8.
More on the London Film Festival
