Queer Women In Love / I Do? Nationwide
It’s a year in December since same-sex marriage legislation was passed in Scotland, so as part of the BFI’s Love initiative, here are two film seasons to mark the occasion. Queer Women In Love includes The Wedding Song, set in Nazi-occupied Tunisia, and up-to-date London stories Stud Life and Break My Fall. The I Do? season, showing in London as well as Scotland, rounds up films directly dealing with gay partnership, such as The Kids Are Alright and Cloudburst, plus older movies that handled queer themes more subtly, such as Hitchcock’s silent classic The Lodger.
Various venues, to 18 Dec
Luis Buñuel: Aesthetics Of The Irrational, London
Many a modern film-maker must envy Buñuel for getting away with so much, so often. His films were invariably confrontational, challenging and illogical, in a way that would be regarded as suicidally uncommercial now. He routinely broached impolite subjects such as incest, religious hypocrisy, paedophilia, prostitution, defecation and eyeball-slicing over his seven decade-spanning career. But more often than not they were packaged with surrealistic humour, sophisticated wit and top European stars such as Catherine Deneuve (to be found here in Tristana and Belle De Jour) and Jeanne Moreau (Diary Of A Chambermaid). As a result, they’ve aged far better than those of his mainstream contemporaries. As well as rounding up some of the Spanish film-making great’s finest works, this retrospective also hears from leading experts and guests such as his long-time writing partner Jean-Claude Carrière and Diego Buñuel, the director’s grandson.
Manchester Animation Festival
Bradford’s long-established animation festival isn’t on this year, but in its place, or just down the M62 from its place, comes this inaugural event. As you’d expect, there are short films in every technique you can think of, and some nobody else possibly ever has (including braille for the blind). There are also some new features, including a documentary on Czech moving image pioneer Karel Zeman, and Lebanese artist, philosopher and writer Kahlil Gibran’s 1923 book The Prophet rendered by a team of top animators, musicians and actors, including Tomm “Song Of The Sea” Moore, who introduces the screening. Among the other guests are Peppa Pig creators Astley and Baker, Shaun The Sheep animator Will Becher and Brian Cosgrove, of Danger Mouse renown.
Fokus: Films From Germany, Scotland
Acclaimed new crime thriller Victoria, shot over a Berlin night in a single, two-and-a-half-hour take, is your gateway drug here for a touring season (coming to seven Scottish towns) that reminds us what a force German cinema still is. It’s a chance, probably the only chance, to catch recent releases such as Who Am I?, on the hot topic of anonymous hackers; Inbetween Worlds, following a soldier in Afghanistan; and Finsterworld, a multi-stranded fable on German identity taking in pedicures, animal outfits and the Holocaust. For historical context, try 1980s Berlin punk documentary B-Movie or boundary-pushing postwar classics by Rainer Werner Fassbinder and Volker Schlöndorff.
