Films
White Plastic Sky
It feels like a while since I’ve seen a feature length animation. This was a bit too long but it was beautiful and a cool concept. Think Logan’s Run but where you turn into plants. Neat.
Leeds International Film Festival 2023
And the film festival is done! Unlike some previous years where I’ve tried to review every single film in detail, this year I’ve decided to keep it light. So here are my Tweet-like short reviews of everything I watched. Let’s go!
Leeds International Film Festival 2023 Preview: Official Selection
It’s back. It’s nearly November, and that means it’s time to grab a copy of the film festival programme, a pencil and comfy chair. It’s time to start picking out the films to get excited about. It’s time to start working out quite how long it takes to get from the city centre up to the Hyde Park Picture House. It’s time to buy some tickets!
The programme launch, with its compilation trailer reel shown on a big screen in Vue has whetted the appetite, so now I’m diving into the list of films and trying to work out what I can see. The plan here is to do a post on each of the major strands, taking a look at what I’m excited about. In this post, I’ll start with the official selection. Let’s go!
Opening and Closing
The big name pictures that bookend the festival are reliably interesting. I’m definitely excited to see Poor Things, the latest from Yorgos Lanthimos. I’ve loved a lot of his films. Dogtooth and Alps are probably due a rewatch - I remember enjoying them, but not a lot about them. The trio that followed (The Lobster, The Killing of a Sacred Deer and The Favourite) are all certified bangers. Each very different and bonkers in their own ways but utterly compelling. The trailer for Poor Things looks pretty promising. A good pick for an opener.
All of which leaves closing film, Slow, with rather a hard act to follow. It sounds interesting enough but I’m not wildly excited about it. But I’ve misjudged a lot of small romances in the past. Sometimes the films that look a little bit dull on paper turn out to be memorable worlds that drag you in. We’ll see…
The rest of the selection…
I’m not going to look at every film, so much as pick out a handful that are calling to me loudly. And there’s a trio of films that are shouting the loudest. Anatomy of a Fall, Palme d’Or winner, looks like my kind of thriller. Meanwhile, Monster is the latest film from Hirokazu Kore-eda - I loved both Shoplifters and Broker (both at previous LIFF screenings!) so am very excited for this one. Rounding out my top three is Sultana’s Dream: I din’t know anything about the director or the source material (though a 1905 sci-fi feminist text certainly has me interested!) but the trailer was jaw-droppingly beautiful.
After that, we move into a mix of the enjoyable, the interesting and the downright weird. Both The Queen of My Dreams and The Holdovers look pretty approachable. I don’t think I’m expecting anything particularly new or exciting from either but they look like they could be sa lot of fun.
After that we’ve got All of Us Strangers (Andrew Scott in a relationship with Paul Mescal from Aftersun!), The Breaking Ice (I’m a sucker for a story about small lives in China) and Kiddo (a chaotic law-breaking mother-daughter road-trip). And my picks are rounded out by a couple of seriously weird looking choices: Chronicles of a Wandering Saint (staged miracles in an attempt to be more saintly than the other members of your church) and Sweet Dreams (a Dutch colonial tale set in Indonesia. The trailer looked weird).
In short…
It’s an exciting looking selection. The main strand can occasionally be a little bit earnest and heavy. This year though, there’s a good mix and plenty that’s calling me loudly.
The Hyde Park Picture House is back!
It’s been too long. Back in 2019, as Friends of the Picture House I remember going to an open event, full of models of the cinema and architects renders of what it might look like one day. As exciting as it was, at that point losing our favourite cinema for a whole year seemed incredibly sad. How would we have felt if we’d known it would be 3?
The best laid plans go awry and 2020 obviously tore apart everyone’s plans everywhere. I don’t think we went to the cinema all year, so the loss of the Picture House was just a small part of the overall sadness (the short notice lockdown of Leeds specifically that killed off the 2020 film festival sticks out as a crushing disappointment). But in 2021 cinemas were back, the film festival was back, and The Hyde park remained closed. And for 2022 as well.
Seats with our names on
Even the most optimistic of film fans might have started to doubt it’d ever open at this point. Any fears were staved off by the fact you could physically see the work happening. On nice days we’d add a detour to outside wanders just to go see the massive hole in the ground next to the picture house. Concrete was torn up, foundations went in, all sorts of activity was going on.
Eventually things were starting to look up. The cinema introduced a number of crowd funding programs - from sponsoring lights to tiles to seats. We leapt at the chance for a seat. Or two. And now we have our names on little brass plaques on the backs of the best seats in the house (in my opinion, at least).
Good memories
It wasn’t a hard choice to sponsor the cinema. It’s been such a source of joy over the 15 or so years I’ve been in Leeds. I still can’t quite work out what the first film I saw there was, but it might have been a student trip to see Aliens, accompanied by a free slice of pizza.
Subsequent happy times have been many and varied. I worked the film festival Night of the Dead a couple of times, emerging bleary eyed into Sunday sunshine after wall to wall splatter horror, and have fond memories of seeing all sorts of stuff there, from indie funded Iron Sky to a whole bunch of Greek weird wave and the adorable animation of A Town Called Panic.
HPPH into the future
I’m so pleased it’s back open again and really looking forward to seeing what they make of the space now. With a second screen, a bar area, accessible entrances, it feels like it has a lot of exciting times ahead.
LIFF2021
Here we go! The 35th Leeds International Film Festival launches its programme this week, ahead of the first screening in November. I think its fair to say I’m a bit excited.
Last year’s last-minute scrapping of the whole festival was such a cruel blow. Mid-October we had a 3 tier system of lockdown (remember that?) and, as the film festival proudly announced, every one of the tiers allowed in-person cinema screenings, the festival was safe! Of course, at the very end of October the government announced Leeds would move into the (previously non-existent) tier 4. And all the screenings had to be scrapped. (And then actually they put the whole country on lockdown just as few days later).
They made the best of it, and we watched a lot of stuff on the online player but it wasn’t really the same. So this year it’s so exciting to be heading back into the cinema for it. Opening film is Spencer, which I’d struggle to care less about, but much like a music festival is never really about the headline acts, the film festival is all about the hidden gems. Fingers crossed for a good year.