Food For Real Film Festival, Liverpool
Salivate at mouth-watering foodie movies? Then stuff your face at this communally oriented spring festival, curated by local food enterprise Squash Nutrition. You can even dance while you cook at a “Disco-Scouse” event (Mar 21) involving the creation of a communal veggie scouse from waste food, with DJ accompaniment. Films will be screened around the city, mostly with associated activities and talks. Taiwanese street-food film The Moveable Feast (Fri), for example, comes with associated culinary delicacies as part of a spring celebration. Other topics include seed-sowing, scavenging and dystopian nutrition.
Various venues, Thu to 22 Mar
Human Rights Watch Film Festival, London
This festival treads a difficult balance between confronting global injustice and providing entertainment for those largely unharmed by it – yet it’s an unimpeachably good cause that effects real change, partly by bearing witness to human rights violations. Freedom of expression is a dominant theme this year: Wim Wenders profiles photographer Sebastião Salgado in The Salt Of The Earth (British Museum, Wed), and Jon Stewart’s Rosewater (Ritzy, 27 Mar) dramatises Iran’s persecution of a Canadian journalist (played by Gael García Bernal). Further off the beaten track are films on Sudanese girls’ war-inspired improvisations; stories from the Arab spring; and the semi-animated story of a herd of Palestinian cows deemed a threat to Israeli security. All screenings are accompanied by film-makers and discussions with relevant groups.
Various venues, Wed to 27 Mar
Flare, London
There’s a place for both the deadly serious and the deliriously joyous at the country’s predominant LBGT-themed festival, and rightly so. On the one hand you’ve got sobering films such as opening gala I Am Michael (Thu & Fri), in which James Franco plays a real-life gay activist-turned-Christian pastor; on the other you’ve got a celebration of Xena: Warrior Princess (21 Mar,) followed by a warrior women-themed party. In between are new tales of sexual discovery and persecution from around the world, factual and fictional, including cutting college satire Dear White People, pioneering Kenyan project Stories Of Our Lives, and profiles of gay icons Tab Hunter and Susan Sontag.
BFI Southbank, SE1, Thu to 29 Mar
Flatpack Film Festival, Birmingham
If you think you’ve seen it all, this agreeably eccentric festival is for you. It brings interactive events to 30 venues across the city, few of which involve actual movies. Sample attractions include a Finnish animation exhibition that features a giant zoetrope; a replica vintage video store; an Edwardian horror night; and a homage to the Japanese art of benshi – live narration and music to silent films – with a screening of Ozu’s Walk Cheerfully (Thu). More conventional offerings, include a retrospective for Sweden’s Roy Andersson, including his surreal latest, A Pigeon Sat On A Branch Reflecting On Existence.
Various venues, Thu to 29 Mar
