Italian Film Festival In Scotland, Cinema Made In Italy, Nationwide
Italian cinema has been making good use of British actors lately: Ralph Fiennes and Tilda Swinton in A Bigger Splash, the Michael Caine-led Youth and Matteo Garrone’s forthcoming Tale Of Tales, with Toby Jones and Shirley Henderson. But they do have stars of their own. These two festivals, which broadly overlap in programming, focus on new faces – one exception being Valeria Golino, who won the best actress prize at Venice last year for her portrayal of an overburdened wife in Anna and will be taking part in a Q&A in London. Other highlights showing at both festivals include youthful dramas Chlorine (a synchronised swimmer’s coming of age) and They Call Me Jeeg (an Italian take on the superhero movie). Nearer to national stereotypes is domestic hit God Willing, about a surgeon who’s horrified to learn his son wants to become a priest.
Various venues, to 17 Mar; Ciné Lumière, SW7, Thu to 14 Mar
Human Rights Watch Film Festival, London
The Tories may be in favour of scrapping the Human Rights Act, but there’s no point burying our heads in the sand about the denial of those rights across the globe. And above the sand, such stories can be the stuff of riveting human drama, as this festival has consistently proved. New documentary Among The Believers, for example, visits an fundamentalist madrassa in Pakistan, while Hooligan Sparrow tells the story of a Chinese activist who faced state surveillance, intimidation and arrest for exposing a paedophile teacher. Stories concerning women, artists and European migration are particularly prevalent this year (Sonita follows an Afghan teenager determined to become a rapper), while closer to home, there’s new doc The Hard Stop, about the police shooting of Mark Duggan and the Tottenham riots.
