Edinburgh Greek Film Festival
We care about Greek cinema more than we used to thanks to the efforts of auteurs like Yorgos “The Lobster” Lanthimos and Athina Rachel “Attenberg” Tsangari. But we also care about Greece more than we used to since it’s become the flashpoint for the EU’s economic problems. So a good time for a sampler of recent offerings from the country. As well as The Lobster, this round-up includes Xenia, an up-to-date comedy in which two siblings search for their Greek father, and Little England, a lush melodrama set on mid-century Andros by Pantelis Voulgaris.
Bath Film Festival
If there was a Bechdel Test for film festivals this one would set the bar, as 40% of the programme claims to be female-led in terms of director, writer and/or principal characters. That could be Lily Tomlin rudely dispensing advice in Grandma (Odeon, 5 Dec) or a Pakistani girl being married off in Dukhtar (Chapel Arts Centre, 8 Dec), Little Girl Blue, a new doc on Janis Joplin (Little Theatre Cinema, Fri) or an Austrian cosmetic-surgery horror (Goodnight Mommy, Odeon, Fri). Now in its 25th year, the festival still brings the customary mix of movies to the city, primarily recent releases, documentaries, family films and international cinema. Previews to catch include Paolo Sorrentino’s follow-up to The Great Beauty, the Michael Caine and Harvey Keitel-starring Youth (Little Theatre Cinema, Fri), Ben Wheatley’s High Rise (Odeon, Thu) and an adaptation of bestseller Room (Odeon, Thu), a child’s-eye view of a lifetime in captivity.
London International Animation Festival
Mainstream movies are plastered with CGI these days, but traditional low-tech animation is still in surprisingly good health. This festival shows you why – and, if you’re interested, how. The bulk of the festival is 118 shorts (whittled down from 2,400 entries, they say) showcasing the imagination, skill and variety of worldwide animation. Among the themed programmes you’ll find everything from Mackenzie Crook as a fly to animal-headed people bickering over model shipbuilding. Guests include Barry Purves and Robert Morgan – two award-winning British animators who use stop-motion in wildly different ways – and there’s more stop-motion in new, feature-length Czech fairytale Little From The Fish Shop.
Stolen Images: People & Power In The Films Of Raoul Peck, London
A film-maker, political activist and one-time Haitian minister of culture who’s lived in Haiti, Congo, the US and France, Raoul Peck is amply qualified to chronicle not just Haitian but pan-African history, particularly its despotic regimes and the mixed results of western aid. He’s done so with a mix of fiction and documentary: the 2005 film Sometimes In April (NFT2, SE1, 11 Dec), starring a pre-Luther Idris Elba, was a fact-based fictionalised account of the Rwandan genocide, for example. And having made a documentary in 1990 on Patrice Lumumba, Congo’s assassinated independence leader (Lumumba, La Mort d’un Prophète), he then drew on new historical evidence to dramatise his story 10 years later in Lumumba (NFT2, SE1, 5 Dec), starring French actor Eriq Ebouaney. Throughout this retrospective, Peck is appearing at various BFI venues.
