National Media Museum, Bradford September 21-27

Bradford's Bite the Mango Festival is now in its 13th year, bringing an increasingly varied taste of world cinema and a welcome splash of brightness to the North of England as the nights begin to draw in. UK premieres, a special focus on the Partition of India on its 60th anniversary, films from Iran, Latin America, Africa, and S E Asia, among others, and a host of short films seductively entitled Slices of Mango were on offer for the week of 21-27 September. I managed to catch six of them.

Directed by Navdeep Singh

Multiple twists and turns, a hint of romance and a mix of public corruption and private transgression make this a cheeky homage to a certain cult thriller of the 70s, which gives us a nudge by appearing half way through as a briefly glimpsed TV movie. Abhay Deol may not be Jack Nicholson, but he is convincing as a listless civil servant and discontented writer of thrillers who is asked to make like the hero of his one, unsuccessful, detective novel and do a little gumshoe work, which leads him deeper and deeper into a world of violence, corruption and deception in the desert-like landscape of Rajasthan. It's both suspenseful and funny, and although it gets rather tangled up in its own plot-lines towards the end, so thick and fast do the twists and revelations come, it's never less than intelligent. Incidental pleasures for European audiences are the glimpses into ordinary provincial Indian family life. It's an impressive debut feature and promises well for the future of this relatively young genre of Indian cinema.

If only I could say the same for the second film from the subcontinent which I saw. Billed as a black comedy based on a true story, Staying Alive outstays its welcome by some length. Terribly slow, it's based on the slight, unimaginative premise that two people from disparate worlds - a journalist and gangster boss, lying beside each other in intensive care after heart attacks - can become close, the ‘baddy' finding a kind of redemption and the law-abiding man realising there is humanity in a previously despised and feared figure. Similarly their wives and a son who wait outside become close and support each other. No surprises there. This would have made a passable short, but it is dragged out with great sentimentality and repetition for what seems like much longer than its 90 minutes, and with scarcely a laugh. Neither black not a comedy.

Two less than feature length Iranian films shown back to back offer insights into life as a woman in modern Iran. The 30-minute Maryam's Sin (2004) is as bleak a film as I've seen all year, a documentary on ‘chastity killings', where male family members murder female relations who have brought shame on the family by sexual misdemeanours (more often than not by being raped...). It focuses on the unbelievable murder by beheading by a father of his 7-year-old daughter whom he believes (probably, as it turns out, wrongly) to have been raped by her young uncle. The film descends deeper and deeper into the horror as we see police-filmed interviews of the man shortly after the crime, while her body (obscured for the camera) lies alongside. In the grubby bag he clutches, we later learn, is her head. As the case progresses the film-makers talk to her young brother and sister who witnessed the crime, as well as police, forensic experts and judiciary. Iranian law may deem it a capital offence, but local and ethnic custom seems to have justifications in the all-powerful ownership status of a father in regard to his family. Although he is sentenced to hanging, the father unbelievably gets off, on appeal, to 3 years imprisonment, after which he will be free to return to his family of two more daughters and a son. Almost unwatchable at times, the film is made with a sober delicacy which underlines the horrors by its reliance on the facts and the words and images of those affected to speak for themselves.

Second up, and a cool, often funny and affecting antidote, is The Ladies (2003). Filmed entirely in the vestibule of a ladies' lavatory in a park in central Tehran, it's 55 intense minutes of women talking about themselves and their lives as they drop in, to use the facilities (one even washes her hair there), touch up their makeup, or just for the company. Many are in no hurry to leave as they crouch comfortably on the gleaming tiled floor and exchange observations, gossip and complaints. More than one are prostitutes, including a lady of considerably advanced years (‘When I go home with them the neighbours think I'm their aunty or their grandmother and don't bother ringing the police!'). Some chatty young women get into quite bitchy gossip and try on each other's chadoors. A middle class girl who has been to the US has strong opinions on runaway daughters. Many are troubled: at least one appears to live in the park with her baby, despite her fantasy talk of a loving husband and bourgeois life. We never leave the square room of shiny tiles despite glimpses of greenery outside, and much focus is on the women's faces, strong and mobile, and despite the hard lives of many of them, it's an infectious, positive feeling of independence against the odds that lingers.

Latin America was represented by two features. Movies, Aspirin and Vultures is a pleasantly ambling road movie from Brazil, about a German wanderer washed up in the early 1940s, after many hippyish wonderings, in Brazil. He earns a living driving around the scrubby countryside selling aspirins, with the help of a small mobile projector with which he shows the drug company's naively promotional films. When he's joined by Ranulpho, who's heading out for the big city, they strike up a warm and easy relationship and become partners in the job. Nights under the stars, snakebites, dalliance with a passing female hitch hiker - life is undemanding, until in August 1942 Brazil joins the war against Germany and nationality, hitherto meaningless, starts to matter. Johann has to decide whether to leave to fight for his country, or be interned. Not a lot happens, but the film looks absolutely great, arid landscapes of deprivation and close-up faces combining to celebrate the importance of the small things of life.

And finally El Cobrador :In God We Trust - what on earth is going on here? Starting with the murder of a dentist (and who can say they haven't been tempted?) we proceed into a glorious muddle of plot, involving at least three strands - an evil millionaire industrialist (Peter Fonda), a silent young Brazilian, both of whom are keen on killing, and a seeming-sensible female photo journalist with a mysterious background. How will they come together? At first we go along swimmingly in what seems like a fairly well done thriller, interestingly shot, with socio-political overtones. But as the film becomes progressively obsessed with its own right-on-ness, with random borrowings from the beginners' book of agitprop film sequences (including the obligatory ‘attractive semi-naked girl finds gun and proceeds to mimic shooting'), not-so-clever chronology shifts, gratuitous arty sex and - oh no - TV images of the Twin Towers, one's reaction changes. Neither head spinning changes of location from Miami to Brazil to Argentina to Mexico, nor long sequences of slave-labourers hauling their loads up the slopes of a gold mine make meaningful anti-globalisation statements. Not that the film loses its attraction - there remains the urge to make some sense and the open-mouthed ‘whatever next' instinct, plus pleasure in the increasingly ludicrous Peter Fonda thread, when he engages the help of an elderly gypsy lady in sequences of overacting to operatic, nay heroic, proportions, which had me in stitches. Never a dull moment, but scarcely what the director intended.

Here's looking at you, Bradford, for your enterprise in bringing such a range of exciting movies to the UK, and here's to a 14th Biting of the Mango next year.

Manorama Six Feet Under directed by Navdeep Singh, India 2007, 135 mins

Staying Alive directed by Ananth Mahadevan, India 2007 90 mins

Maryam's Sin (Gonah-E Maryam) directed by Parisa Shahandeh, Iran 2004 30 mins

The Ladies (Zananeh) directed by Mahnaz Afzali, Iran 2003, 55 mins

Movies, Aspirin and Vultures (Cinema, Aspirinas e Urubus) directed by Marcelo Gomes, Brazil, 99 mins

El Cobrador :In God We Trust directed by Paul Leduc, Mexico/Spain/Brazil, 2006, 90 mins