MUSIC
Live accompaniment to 1927 silent classic SUNRISE: A SONG OF TWO HUMANS is a festival highlight. Multi-instrumentalist Stephen Horne and harpist Elizabeth-Jane Baldry improvise the score to this magical film. Sensational Cuban rumbera star, Ninón Sevilla, is back in triplicate. In ADVENTURESS, TAKE ME IN YOUR ARMS and VICTIMS OF SIN, Ninón sings, dances, endures immeasurable hardships, but reigns supreme. Jazz from Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, Nina Simone, Miriam Makeba and others punctuates the innovative documentary SOUNDTRACK TO A COUP D’ÈTAT.
COMEDY
Comedy comes in many forms from SISTER MIDNIGHT’s punkish take on arranged marriage to the subtle absurdities of Isabelle Huppert’s puzzling French ex-pat in A TRAVELER'S NEEDS. Huppert resurfaces in glitzy, screwball 1930s Paris in THE CRIME IS MINE, while Ian McKellen’s bitchy turn in THE CRITIC is sharp as battery acid. Juan Salvador Pinguino is the perfect foil to Steve Coogan’s sardonic wit in THE PENGUIN LESSONS and Carmen the pooch plays for laughs in THE SUMMER WITH CARMEN. Comic plot devices centre around rapidly devaluing Ostmarks in TWO TO ONE and cheese in HOLY COW.
RURAL
A wealth of rural films brims with contrasts. From loca docs spotlighting Hereford’s historic cattle market (CHEWING THE CUD) and apple traditions (WELCOME TO THE ORCHARD OF ENGLAND), move into seemingly idyllic corners of provincial France where toxic fungi thrive among the autumn leaves(MISERICORDIA, WHEN AUTUMN FALLS). Step into a bleak Irish farming community for powerful revenge thriller BRING THEM DOWN and penetrate the Italian Alps of VERMIGLIO where change happens slowly. Further afield, an Occupied West Bank village is the setting for horrific human rights violations in NO OTHER LAND, while extremism in the Tunisian mountains disrupts the serenity of childhood in RED PATH. Finally, feel the reality of climate migration and its effect on rural communities in Mongolia in THE WOLVES ALWAYS COME AT NIGHT. HARVEST is a radical adaptation of Jim Crace's novel about a fictional rural community facing changes and enclosures while a family tries to live off-grid in A NEW KIND OF WILDERNESS.
