London Film Festival - critics' choice

The festival continues with its excellent programme of features, documentaries, shorts and gems from the archive.

Oct 26 2004

Full reviews of critics’ choices and all other films at the festival this week are available online and in Time Out Magazine October 27-November 3 2004 (No. 1784).

‘Los Angeles Plays Itself’
Thur 28 8.15, NFT1; Sun 31, 12.00 NFT3
A treat for both film fans and Los Angeles-ologists, Thom Andersen’s compendious polemic on the various inflictions and infractions that Hollywood (the motion-picture industry) has visited upon its host city posits itself as ‘a city symphony in reverse’ – a collage of documentary insights trawled from the world of features. [More]

Experimenta Avant-Garde weekend
Fri 29 to Sun 31, NFT3
All too often, the kind of work found in the LFF’s extremely welcome Experimenta strand is marginalised or, worse, completely ignored, but here, under curator Mark Webber’s wide-ranging nurture, it has become a vital port of call for those interested in the further reaches of moving image practice. Covering docs, longform pieces and shorts, from artists’ film and video to found footage assemblies and leftfield narrative features, it’s guaranteed both to intrigue and provoke. (Full review in magazine).

‘Aaltra’
Sat 30, 9.00; Mon 1, 4.00, OWE1
One of those lovely, laconic, slightly surreal black comedies Belgium comes up with from time to time, this charts the ferocious rivalry between a farmer and a commuter (played by the film’s writer/directors), already irate at recent developments in their lives when they are both involved in an accident that leaves them paralysed from the waist down. Though they detest one another, they find themselves first in adjoining hospital beds, then reluctantly accompanying each other in wheelchairs on a northward odyssey through Belgium. [More]

‘Turtles Can Fly’
Tue 2, 6.30 NFT1
Ghobadi’s debut, ‘A Time for Drunken Horses’, was a powerful drama about the plight of poor, orphaned and dangerously ill children in Kurdistan; they feature again in this look at life in a refugee camp near the Iraqi-Turkish border, in the weeks immediately preceding the US/UK invasion. With its darkly comic portrait of young ‘Satellite’ – a teenage Mr Fixit who organises the kids into mine-clearing groups, swaps old radios for TV antennae and negotiates with the local village elders – the first half comes on a little like Altman’s ‘MASH’. But then, as we learn more about the history of the girl he’s fallen for and her two ‘brothers’, the film moves into more nightmarish territory, foreshadowing the war to come and Satellite’s disenchantment with his American liberators. Tough stuff, and very affecting. [More]

‘Innocence’
Wed 3, 9.00 OWE1
Is this a horror movie or a grim fairy tale? Dedicated to her colleague, confrontationalist director Gaspar Noé, and sourced from a work by dark expressionist Frank Wedekind, Lucile Hadzihalilovic’s stunning debut describes the purgatorial existence of schoolgirls in a sequestered rural college. [More]

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