Part I - Perriers Bounty; Eccentricities of a Blonde Haired Girl; Fish Eyes; Redland

This year the Bradford International Film Festival takes a slightly different form,lasting only 10 days but screening films in many locations around Yorkshire, from Pocklington, east of York, to Hebden Bridge, Ilkley, Otley and Leeds, as well as at other screens in the city including the Cineworld multiplex and Bradford Playhouse. The usual mix of exciting new films from around the world (Moviedrome), challenging independent films from America (Uncharted States), and retrospectives (this year honouring work by John Hurt, Fernando Meirelles and Nicolas Roeg) are joined by new films from Canada (Hollywood North), US teen films, and a widescreen weekend.

The opening up of the festival to more audiences outside the city, always a good thing, although at the expense of festival devotees who like to bag as many films as possible at central locations, will hopefully boost audiences, so that next year more films can be shown twice, both iin the city and at the satellite venues, enabling programmes such as the innovative Uncharted States and Hollywood North, to be seen in their entirety. Outreach should not mean the weakening of the central core.

Simultaneous with the opening of the festival was the official declaration of Bradford as first ever Unesco City of Film, part of the Creative Cities Network, a real triumph for Northern England, sparking many film-centred projects for the future.

Gala opening film on Thursday 18 March was

Perrier's Bounty

Directed by Ian Fitzgibbon

Early Ritchie and even Tarantino are two names that have been mentioned in relation to this violent gangster comedy, but the addition of Irish whimsy, sentimentality and romance to the mix makes for an unsatisfying dish overall. Perrier's Bounty certainly has its moments, and plenty of competent actors acting their socks off, yet in spite of this I felt pretty unconcerned about the fate of the characters or the course of the convoluted plot. Michael McCrea (Cillian Murphy) wakes up with a bad hangover and two heavies training a gun on him to extract the money he owes the bossman Perrier (Brendan Gleeson), which naturally he doesn't have. Seems like things can only get worse. And they do.

Doing a job with yet another wrong'un (Liam Cunningham) thickens the plot, as does his involvement with the lovelorn, unstable girl downstairs (Jodie Whittaker) who, inevitably, gets swept along in the merry chase. The arrival of his errant father (Jim Broadbent), claiming to be at death's door, brings in a strand of sentimentality that doesn't really work at all. Recourse to screeching cars, burning cars, clamped cars, smashed heads, torture, murderous dogs, ill-lit pool halls, derelict industrial buildings, and the inevitable drive out to the pretty countryside, all the usual crime caper paraphernalia in fact, seems not much more than formulaic, artfully though it's done. There's some pleasing wit in the lines, but it doesn't have the ironic anti-heroics of In Bruges, another film with which it's been compared. Where the metaphorical father/son relationship in that film is full of ambiguities, the actual one here is horribly clichéed, Jim Broadbent, great actor though he is, doesn't make much more than a sentimental cipher of Michael's father (And what kind of Irish accent is that Jim's sporting, by the way?), and Cillian Murphy's Michael has no real character at all, merely a pretty, lovable rogue freshly sprung from the script writer's head without background or past. Brendan Gleeson, as ever, is an asset, and makes the most of his hip dialogue, but sadly none of the characters had me either rooting for them or cheering when they met their comeuppance. In the end sentimentality prevails, a gruesomely predictable ending.

It could well be an audience pleaser; laughter and the cries of alarm alternated from the opening night gala audience, but for me the mix of extreme violence and sentiment just didn't sit well together.

Eccentricities of a Blonde Haired Girl (Singularidades de uma rapariga loura)

Directed by Manoel de Olveira

Fish Eyes (Yu yan)

Directed by Wei Zhang

Landscape is king in this slow moving and atmospheric tale of modern China, where an elderly sunflower farmer lives in a run-down lakeside cottage with his ne'er do well son and later mysterious, silent young woman who arrives without explanation and is taken under his wing. But the kindness of strangers is double-edged for her when the son, caught up in westernised gang life, utilises her to attempt to pay off a moral debt. Tractors turn over the soil, creating a desolation where only the peace of the waterside reeds and the tremendous skies remain of the old countryside. Urban life as glimpsed is cheap and unlovely, and the sunflowers, which one thinks of as a bright and joyful presence, are only present in decaying form. The longed for western modernity of guitar and motorbike seems capable of breeding only discontent and destruction. When something hppens, it is almost always offscreen. A little too long and occasionally self-conscious, it's an interesting debut from a cinema which is beginning to truly make itself heard internationally.

Redland

Directed by Asiel Norton

Still eight days to go of this festival, and whatever it has in store I can guarantee that this film will be one of the absolute highlights. Shot, unusually for a true American indie film, on celluloid, it's a remarkable sensory, emotional journey into the lives of a country family living in near starvation during the depression of the 30s They are not, as I was expecting, dirt-poor farmers in the dustbowl, but hunters and small animal farmers in a great and beautiful forest, where burgeoning nature almost mocks their plight. Every frame is beautiful, but never in a self-conscious way, and its strong narrative element grabs the attention from the outset. Norton, previously a photographer, has captured the ravishing, amoral flavour of nature in the wild in a way that is reminiscent of Terrence Malick's The New World. It's a world he knows well, being raised in a mountain cabin with ‘no television, limited electricity, and water from a nearby stream'. Human relations and the ways of the forest are presented big and close-up or obliquely, the camera a silent intimate observer of half-glimpsed, half understood happenings, lit by shafts of sun or meagre candlelight. Brilliantly, for all the tragedy, it's finally a feeling of wonder that prevails, of a world constantly renewing itself.

Part 2, click here...