Having made three longer documentaries and three feature films, Hopkins is a particular example of the transnational filmmaker travelling the world much like Michael Winterbottom, Alejandro González Iñárritu or Werner Herzog; Herzog particularly for telling his stories through both fiction and documentary. More so than these though, Hopkins seems fascinated with national borders and people frittering through and around them.

Simon Magus, his well received feature debut, set Hopkins’ stall well. It brilliantly sets up many of the concerns of continental 20th century Europe through the problems facing a declining Jewish village in the 19th century. In some respects the period drama trappings covered up the vast themes beneath. As with the documentary 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep a group of people without borders as such are threatened by a world increasingly defined by them. On the surface Simon Magus is a low-budget period piece with strong casting (including Ian Holm and Rutger Hauer) yet the ideas run deep encompassing industrialisation, emigration, superstition, religion and bigotry.

Trade underpins the plot as the villagers vie with their gentile neighbours for access to the local railway line. Whoever controls the station will make a fortune. Exchange abounds as the villagers and the local merchants interact through the aristocracy and the village idiot for whom the film is named for, played by Noah Taylor.

Yet the railway is a deeply transgressive technology. Principally in the minds of a modern audience are the diabolical undertones given to the encroaching sleepers. We know exactly what will happen to these people’s descendents in the age of mechanised national socialism. More gently as the beginning of the film suggests, with shots of boarded-up houses, it will allow the villagers to seek a better life elsewhere if they wish. More directly it allows a village daughter to go to university and strike common ground with the local squire. All is change and the villagers cope as they can.

Although nominally set in Silesia it’s not entirely clear where Simon Magus is set, bringing echoes of fantasy writer Michael Moorcook’s European nowhere place Mittelmarch, itself a word inspired by both George Eliot’s novel Middlemarch and the German word for borderlands. Incidentally, the fantastical links onwards to Hopkins second feature, The Nine Lives of Tomas Katz, where London gets demolished at the whim of the body-swapping central character in tones recalling Iain Sinclair and China Miéville and more besides. Riffing off German expressionism, Katz emerges from a hole in the ground with an ill-defined, never specified German accent. This is an extreme example of the preoccupation of exchange, with its central character physically switching with the people he meets. No one can cope with this level of change. It wrecks the world.

Shifting borders are part of the villagers’ predicament in Simon Magus and this is exactly the consequences examined for another people in the documentary 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep. Told in a jokey first-person fashion Hopkins describes and re-enacts the story of the Pamir Kirghiz, a Turkic tribe originally from what became Afghanistan. Buffeted by the successive nation building of the British, Russians and then the Soviets, the Pamir Kirghiz eventually ended up in eastern Turkey in 1982. 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep is distinctive because of its framing device, an old villager teaching Hopkins how to get the most of an ungulate. Hopkins interacts and learns, even using their dialect of Turkish. It’s a marked step away from more polemical works. This isn’t to say that Hopkins doesn’t do rhetoric. Footprints and Naples Open City 1943-1948 are much more targeted.

Finding these stories is not without its risks. In an interview talking about the documentary Footprints Hopkins recounts how close he came to obliteration. Whilst shooting this documentary on cluster bombs in Afghanistan he wandering off from a bomb clearance site to record some background sound. Taking care to stay on the designated safe path his English manners overcame any conscious safety instincts making him step back to allow a local riding a donkey pass by. Sure enough uncomfortably close to his toes was the yellow casing of a live bomb. The anecdote has parallels to documentarian Humphrey Jennings’ lethal tumble from a Greek cliff in 1950 whilst scouting for locations. Certain kinds of filmmakers need to get out there to tell their stories.

After 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep Hopkins returned to trade square on, with both a fictional feature and a documentary. Both projects bear resemblance to The Third Man and its world of commerce gone mad. In The Market – A Tale of Trade a Turkish smuggler heads into Azerbaijan in search of medicine for his town. Naples Open City 1943-1948 is expressly about the Italian city from Allied liberation and how this lead to the city’s current day malaise. As such it works well as a companion piece to both the book and film of Gomorrah, Roberto Saviano’s excoriating depiction of the Naples mafia the Camorra.

Disruption in Naples Open City 1943-1948 resides in the lawlessness of an occupied city. In The Market it is mobile phones. Set in 1994 the business is starting to take-off and the protagonist hopes to secure a licence through his smuggling. Although set over ten years before it was made (in 2008) the film sets up the turbulent economics of the period by stating how much the exchange rate between the Turkish Lira and the US Dollar was at the time. The Turkish Lira plummeted that year. Teasingly Hopkins chose mobile phones for The Market, a relatively new technology for which we still have no idea what the social consequences will be.

With all these negative implications for change it’s tempting to suspect that Hopkins is anti-globalisation. The end of 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep has interviews with the children of the Pamir Kirghiz who grew up in eastern Turkey. They all seem to want to head to the bright lights of Istanbul as soon as possible. Crucially, Hopkins doesn’t judge them for this. It’s sad that some traditions will be lost but the film itself is one attempt to remember some of them. Similarly, the price accepted, the railway may help the villagers in Simon Magus and Turkey’s economy powers on.

Hopkins seems like a director tailor made for the headrush of our times. In an ever wired world national borders seem ever more irrelevant. It’s likely coincidence but Hopkins released Simon Magus in 1999, in the middle of the Dot-com bubble. Today, we continue to confront the future shock of constant technological change with little time to consider the implications on everything else. Here is someone whose films help us to.

Could you even dare to describe Aryton Senna’s talent as supernatural? I pose this to a work colleague, whether he would concede that the three time Formula One world champion racing driver had some ineffable ability beyond something as mundane as sheer raw talent. My colleague guffaws in denial: Aryton Senna was merely a good driver who repeatedly crashed and died young. Arguably my sparring partner on this issue might be the best person in the world to answer this one since he’s both an amateur magician and a petrolhead. With his ever-present deck of cards he seeks tirelessly for that sweet-spot where sleight-of-hand, showmanship and gullibility sing.

Reassuringly the lead character in Kapadia’s short The Sheep Thief also performs magic tricks. As the Arthur C. Clarke quote goes, “Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic.” Ditto talent. Kapadia’s muses are generally nothing if not accomplished: the chief enforcer for a local lord in The Warrior; the Inuit who survives against all the odds in Far North; the top saleswoman in The Return; the driving sensation in Senna.

Yet like any cabaret magician the stage where Kapadia pulls his tricks is key. Whether upon the deserts of Rajasthan, Texas, frigid Svalbard or the barren asphalt of a race track he presents his characters in the foreground of such awesome spaces. Typically there’s an extreme contrast set between the deeply absorbing characters these stories follow and the sensationally spectacular landscapes they roam. Little surrounds them heightening the focus upon them. The Warrior opens with Irfan Khan practising his sword-play upon a sand dune: beige-yellow sand below, gradient deep blue sky behind. Later a scene plays upon this by having a pair of beetles scuttle across shot only for it to pan out to the villains riding horseback across their path. Briefly it is the beetles’ moment before bigger concerns are revealed.

By Far North the contrast between characters and background seems to reach an apogee with one of the most inhospitable environments imaginable. Past this lonely trio of Inuits and interloper lies nothing but pack ice and endless night. Simply put, there is nothing out there except for these characters. Senna, meanwhile, turns this on its head by making the backdrop us against the superlative skills of a single man.

As an aside, it’s nice to see Kapadia’s British side emerge with a suspected preoccupation with weather. Desert leads to snow, just as The Warrior leads to Far North, with the warrior’s visions of ice in his footprints. Irresistibly Aryton Senna often drove best in wet conditions, a fact commented upon in Senna more than once.

Back on contrasts, the lead in The Warrior Irfan Khan offers a visage to match the sandscapes of Rajasthan. With tensed brow, sunken swollen eyes and lips permanently about to form the question the film revolves around – why he plies his violent trade – he’s a great casting coup. Less impressively Kapadia chose to use ethnically Chinese actors to play the Inuits in Far North which breaks the illusion somewhat, with a move along similar lines to old-school Hollywood mix-and-match casting for ethnic parts. Sean Bean’s undoubtedly too old for the role of the man who tears older and younger woman apart but at least he looks hewn of northern stone. Aryton Senna’s averted gaze lends itself well to introspection, as the cheeky youth becomes the eventual martyr to his sport. Note the image used on the poster for Senna: eyes piercing out from the visor gap in his helmet, looking upwards into the unknowable distance.

The joker in the pack of all of this is The Return. Packaged badly as yet another cheap American horror it’s certainly no triumphant move to Hollywood for Kapadia. The first clue to its definite otherness lies in the casting of actor and playwright Sam Shepherd. Even Sarah Michelle Gellar’s presence in the lead offers a glimmer of subversion given her signature role as Buffy the Vampire Slayer. The second clue lies in a feel very much off kilter similar to Vertigo, reinforced by Dario Marianelli’s subdued score. The Return feels exactly like a B-movie script floating around that fitted Kapadia’s themes in the years after The Warrior was made. Laboured and mostly unrewarding the bones of a good film stir fleetingly, one of those oddball projects thrown to promising European directors to prove their box-office mettle. The tang of M. Night Shyamalan lingers.

An air of myth and fable suffuses Kapadia’s films telescoping the personal to the epic. Comparisons with David Lean or Akira Kurosawa or Sergei Leone suit the grand visions of The Warrior and Far North but they don’t do justice to all that’s going on. Tellingly in an interview with Curzon programmer Jason Wood for Kamera.co.uk Kapadia flags up Tran Ang Hung’s Cyclo as an influence for making The Sheep Thief. This Golden Lion winner from 1995 mixes up intense imagery with a frenzied on-the-street feel for Vietnamese life.

Kapadia pulls a similar approach in each of his works, pushing in more of a spiritual introspective direction. With their mixtures of professional and non-professional casts The Sheep Thief and The Warrior are exemplar; Far North and The Return less so. Senna, arguably Kapadia’s greatest attempt at this to date, brings this aspect to a popular audience, recounting the tale of a modern-day legend caught in the reality glare of documentary, with all the archive footage and interviews. When it rains Kapadia makes you believe that a man can drive like magic.

Andrea Arnold seems up for a fight. Certainly her lead characters are. At the start of Fish Tank teenage hothead Mia sears across her housing estate to find a friend who’s failed to return her calls. After discovering the friend dancing with a bunch of girls she doesn’t like she ends up headbutting one of them before pounding off in anger.

Similar scenes take place in most of Arnold’s films, particularly with characters glowering as they detonate towards or implode from a confrontation. Natalie Press striding across dessicated grass with a naked child under her arm in the short film Wasp; Kate Dickie taking the lift down from a tower-block flat, her motives finally uncovered in Red Road; James Howson smacking his head against the wood in Wuthering Heights. This sense of real people with lightning-rod temperaments sparking with grounded emotions as they prowl through their communities powers her work.

What Arnold is actually about befuddles. What exactly is she fighting for? Everybody struggles to peg her, often plumping for the ghost of British social realism. After all her films have tower blocks in them… Even her period adaptation of Emily Brontë novel Wuthering Heights made the Earnshaw’s moorland farmhouse feel like social housing. Yet it is an uneasy fit. Certainly her films to date have strong female characters in them, who often seem to be stomping through council estates.

Unlike Ken Loach’s political causes, Arnold’s focus are her characters. Given the intensity of the incandescent lead performances in her films – Kate Dickie, Katie Jarvis, Shannon Beer – Mike Leigh is a far better fit. Yet where Leigh starts by intensively building his characters and setting them adrift towards a crisis, Arnold seems to nurture her champions for provocation and punch-ups. Crucially like most successful pugilists Arnold picks fights she knows she can win. Teasing themes like CCTV, seduction as revenge, female aggression, underage sex, cross-racial casting and so on are exactly that: teasing.

After three award-winning shorts set within the tidal pull of estuary south-east England Arnold’s first feature, Red Road, decamped to Glasgow. A bespoke film made using characters devised by a group of (mostly) Danes any social-realist street cred she might have had plummeted to the floor at this point. Eyebrows could hardly be raised at the thought of a fraudulent filmmaker making her debut under the auspices of the Loki of the European film world, Lars von Trier. Yet, if Arnold is a fake she keeps good company. Filmmaking is the art of faking it.

Red Road remains apart from Arnold’s other work because of its genesis and location. Choosing a lead character as a CCTV operator provides a brilliantly cinematic note along similar lines to Rear Window. We, the audience, are watching; Jackie, the lead character played by Kate Dickie, is watching, but we don’t know what or why. CCTV also paid dividends for the film, given the growing public awareness over the number of cameras watching the public in the UK at the time of release in 2006.

The slow burn plot releases a similar feel to John Turturro’s forlorn security guard trying to solve his wife’s murder in Fear X. This mixing of artificial and natural intimacy achieves head (literally) with the film’s stark sex scene when Jackie finally has sex with the guy she’s been stalking from the CCTV control room. As he performs cunnilingus on her they are bathed in the deep glow of a lava lamp and can hear foxes screaming far below.

However given its continuation of earlier themes, Fish Tank was more along the lines people expected for a feature debut from Arnold. It suffers in comparison to Red Road due to the less focused plot but mile-high estuary skies give the film a sense of location its Scottish predecessor can’t match. South-east London and beyond hit an end-of-the-world feel that give the hemmed-in feelings Mia must feel for her home absolutely nowhere to go. It’s not surprising that when she briefly abducts a toddler the pair end up being blocked by the nowhere place where river and sea froth and coalesce. This sense of being blocked by an overbearing sky overshadows most of her films.

Having a more high profile cast creates problems with the impeccable setting which also happens in her next work. Harry Treadaway is a weak link in Fish Tank, as is Kaya Scodelario in Wuthering Heights. Just like Kate Dickie in Red Road though Katie Jarvis, who plays Mia, stuns with her performance; ditto Shannon Beer as the young Cathy in Wuthering Heights.

Given Arnold’s superiority in portraying locations it’s perhaps unsurprising how evocative she makes the setting of Wuthering Heights. Dually beautiful and horrific, animals get routinely slaughtered and everybody bar the leads develops a bronchitic cough. Shot naturalistically by regular Arnold cinematographer Robbie Ryan the moors look amazing. Arnold and Ryan dream up a soaking, muddy landscape.

In the pivotal scenes with the younger incarnations of Heathcliff and Cathy, the teenage tearaways end up rolling in the mud, Cathy effectively ‘blackening’ up to match Heathcliff’s dark tones. Pushing the housing estates themes one further, Arnold makes her Heathcliff black in this adaptation. Yet another example of the director’s ability to know exactly what to challenge. Life is all around with dogs continually roaring around, and Cathy and Heathcliff dashing off into the fog or through the heather.

Dogs, in fact, may provide the missing link to previous attempts to define Andrea Arnold: they appear in all of her feature films. Provocation, performance and naturalism may help to define some of Andrea Arnold’s preoccupations to date but one shouldn’t underestimate the canine concurrences. Jackie watches a dog owner in Red Road, Mia gets chased down by traveller dogs in Fish Tank and, best of all, dogs get hung from trees in Wuthering Heights. The fact that Arnold chose not to excise the dog baiting present in the source novel from the script barks volumes.

In this graduation short film three events play out in the life of a Scottish girl. First in Ma & Da we bear witness to her realisation that her parent’s relationship may be dysfunctional. Then in Holy Cow, the girl and a friend rush out into this Super-8-style primal-coloured countryside full of rivers, long grass and snails. It’s beautiful as they brush through corn and roll over, to a kind of jump-cut sense of time and turned-up pastoral sounds. Loud boys interrupt this idyll with their raucous behaviour which fascinates the older girl. Later they come across a blooded cow which may be due to the boys. Finally in Joke we reach the teenage years full of social housing corridors, group acceptance and the braying of a baby off-screen for what possibly awaits this character. Her life is doomed yet it’s heartbreakingly beautiful. Vitally, we immerse ourselves in her world whilst her thoughts on the situation remain guarded.

Similar to Terrence Davies’ short film trilogy all of the themes in Small Deaths play out in Ramsey’s features in ever-decreasing circles of reference yet a core lingers. Ratcatcher mirrors Small Deaths the most with its foundations of tragedy amidst the 1970s Glasgow bin men strike. Morvern Callar, Ramsey’s first adaptation, preserves the Scottish connection with its slow move from Oban to Southern Spain, and a love of outdoor space remains. We Need to Talk About Kevin, Ramsey’s second adaptation, holds its focus on a prominent female lead, a dysfunctional family and a foreboding colour scheme. Ramsey copes with the move to an anonymous North American suburban setting well but something is lost in the process. Phantasmal flickers of how Ramsey might have approached an adaptation of Alice Sebold’s novel The Lovely Bones in the early 2000s conjure easily. So easily in fact that it’s probably for the best that she aborted the project.

One of Ramsey’s motifs is to counterpoint domestic tragedy with haunting imagery. Vitally, her images arise from the genuine surroundings of the characters. Sweeping corn fields are a mere bus-ride away for James from the canal in Ratcatcher. Morvern Callar disposes of her boyfriend’s corpse in a glistening wintry paradise before fleeing from a crummy 18-30 holiday to the plains of Andalucia. For much of We Need to Talk About Kevin viewers can play a game spotting red in most frames. One of her most memorable visions literally achieves escape velocity in Ratcatcher when a mouse floats upwards tied to a balloon in yet another cruel boyish prank. Apollo-era black-and-white footage follows imagining the lunar body overridden with rodents.

Those domestic set-ups though are just as important as the stand-out imagery. Another of her short films, Gasman, presents a Christmas party seen from the perspective of a child, often showing the middles of bodies or scampering feet. Between the play the adults sit smoking and drinking; a Father Christmas wanders across shot cradling a pint. Ratcatcher takes this further still giving a young boy, James, the guilt of murder against the grim setting of his family trying to get new accommodation. Notably at one point his dad dresses whilst talking to a social worker. This visual attention to detail exposes the photographer in Ramsey, giving her the social realist mantle for the moments she stays in the present.

From here it becomes more complicated as Ramsey started to do adaptations. Morvern Callar is especially tricksy yet the world she lives in isn’t: more Scottish Christmas parties in pubs; Brits acting like piss-heads abroad. Morvern Callar’s unknowable quality is heightened by the source novel and the actress who plays her, Samantha Morton. Morton’s face maintains a china-doll quality throughout between exposing the emotions that are expected of the character. Teasingly in the club scene in Spain her face retains its neutrality as the strobe ebbs and the beats throb. In Kevin the family unit is the entire focus, teasing the unknowable question: nature or nurture. Similarly to Morton’s performance Tilda Swinton gives her character in Kevin a pursed-lips quality as the default from which all else flows. Again, this is a character in-extremis not reacting to the normal societal script.

Women feature heavily in Ramsey’s films but it’s worth considering the boys for a moment. Often reviled or viewed with suspicion in packs when they emerge as individuals they become far more conflicted. James in Ratcatcher is a boy struggling to cope in a garbage-strewn world yet he’s killed his friend. Morvern Callar’s dead boyfriend has dumped her in this life, leaving her to react counter-intuitively yet he’s also given her the means to escape working in the supermarket permanently. John C. Reilly’s character in Kevin is the nicest one of the lot but he fails to perceive Kevin for the danger he is, siding against his wife. This leaves Kevin: the worst/best of all Ramsey’s male characters. He’s so certain of his impregnable superiority yet he admits he doesn’t know why he committed a massacre at the end.

A veil divides us from Lynne Ramsey’s characters. Or to suit the domestic worlds she captures, maybe a bead curtain. A photographer by training Ramsey’s eye for personal detail tricks our eyes in to a sharpened sense of reality. From children rummaging around 1970s Glasgow to a mother at war with her child these all seem like real people because their surroundings come so alive. Yet the disconnect dawns when we discover that their actions or situations are all so extraordinary: the boy who hides his guilt over drowning his friend; the girlfriend who steals her dead boyfriend’s novel; the mother of a killer. Ramsey shows them all to us with a visual clarity which only makes the fall harder when we realise that we can’t ever truly know who they are.

Watching Carmichael again nearly ten years later in the aftermath of the 2011 summer riots seemed prescient. Briefly it became tempting to link up a mass-culture of non-responsibility – from bankers wrecking our economy, to members of parliament abusing their expenses, to journalists breaking privacy laws in search of vacuous celebrity titbits – to the looting. Thomas Clay’s vision of youth in revolt seemed to come true. Carmichael genuinely shocked with its orgiastic finale of middle England youth gone bitterly sour. It dared to run its own home invasion against the US-led one of Iraq; something which most British commentators took very badly indeed in 2005. Five years later though in 2010 Paul Andrew Williams did similar things in Cherry Tree Lane, minus the overt politics, to barely a ripple of disapproval.

Carmichael also introduced audiences to Clay’s fondness for deep focus in the film’s signature scene. Lead character Robert Carmichael sinks into a couch high on drugs as Tony Blair plays on a television and a girl gets raped through a doorway just off camera. Soi Cowboy took this further with its long scenes of an oddball couple mooching around a flat in Bangkok. Few films have been able to make a fat man taking a shower so mesmerising. Even the micro-budget Motion uses similar shot construction notably in one scene in a car park.

Clay takes this further though, using the frame (and indeed entire films) to counterpoint ideas. Motion, made for a low budget mostly comes across as a well-observed, well-made piece of miserablism until it dives into an ending with echoes of Terry Gilliam. Recalling the ballroom dancing moment in New York’s Grand Central Station in The Fisher King, homeless guy Don endures a day of agony only to discover a frozen world in the early morning. Following a worker wearing a high-visibility jacket through the station he chances upon the subterranean factory of time and motion. Here, the man stuck observing the street rhythms of Brighton from a kerb-side level suddenly gains utter control of it all, shunting time, buses and inhabitants backwards and forwards to his whim from an industrial power-station style console.

As mentioned previously Carmichael bluntly runs the Iraq invasion against teen rebellion, structuring this tension throughout the whole film leading up to the signposted shock ending. Soi Cowboy develops this even further again. Shot at first in black and white it starts out by playing lots of visual juxtapositions between European filmmaker Tobias and his Thai girlfriend Koi. At first they seem to inhabit the same Bangkok flat but with a minimum of interaction. Later this leads to visual farce as Tobias tries to type away on his laptop to Koi jabbing away at her similarly clamshelled games machine. Later still the couple become lost in the frame as the camera abandons them on a tour of some ruins. Here, Clay pulls off his Apichatpong Weerasethakul moment by moving to colour and telling Koi’s brother’s story instead. Amongst other ideas he’s comparing European and Thai culture through the couple to the extent of using differing cinematic styles.

In interview, Clay has expressed admiration for Michelangelo Antonioni amongst other influences and certainly there is an Antonioni feel to his longer takes and his characters. To date each of the main characters in Clay’s film have been infused with ennui. Motion has its homeless guy wandering the streets; Carmichael has its schoolboy shrugging off middle-class aspirations to get high and simply walk off into the sea mist. In Soi Cowboy it may just be the tedium of sex tourism working both ways.

Could it be more than coincidence that the hideout Don discovers in Motion is called the factory of time and motion? Motion basically hands the disenfranchised the best turntables ever. Given the skill with which he employs cinematic motifs it would be churlish to accuse Clay of being a stylistic magpie. Yet if we can imagine a filmmaker along similar lines to Antonioni who perhaps grew up amongst UK club culture in Brighton in the 1990s maybe we’re close to addressing Clay’s central enigma. As Faithless might say, could Thomas Clay be a DJ?

Similar to Terry Gilliam’s original script for Time Bandits where a character later played by Sean Connery was described as looking “exactly like Sean Connery”, first time directors Will Sharpe and Tom Kingsley wrote a character who would be “what Hugh Abbot (the character Langham played in The Thick of It) might be like if he went home”. The part struck a chord with Langham and the resulting film reminds us how good Langham is. He’s still one of the best comedy actors of his generation, surprisingly sorely missed.

Playing a happy-go-lucky middle-aged guy, Langham’s character Tom Thompson teases round the awareness that his marriage is finished now the kids have left home. In the film he meets a stranger called Blake, whose own personal grief grows and grows to eclipse the implosion of the Thompson family. Along the way almost everything Langham does exudes hapless humour. As Sharpe puts it, “I think part of the reason why Chris is funny is because he plays everything pretty straight. The best comedic actors, in my opinion, don’t make it obvious that what they’re doing or saying is supposed to be funny.”

Sharpe and Kingsley made the short Cockroach in 2009 which led the way to making their first feature. Set in Japan this impressive longer (30 minutes) short film is a distinctive calling card. Observations which emerge from it which might apply to Black Pond are the off-kilter humour, a fondness for zoetrope-like spinning dream sequences and a certain boldness.

Unfortunately the production company stumping up the funding for the feature changed its mind forcing the pair to scrabble around into micro-budget territory. Not everything works in the final product: a talking-heads structure grates and the presence of comedian Simon Amstell simply doesn’t fit. Wes Anderson-style indulgence for the lives twenty-somethings might want to live in London is slightly more acceptable. Casting the likes of Amanda Hadingue and Colin Hurley confirms that the film would have worked well without its lead.

Yet by casting an actor ensnared in the hypocrisy of tabloid justice, Sharpe and Kingsley have had the barrage of news coverage for their debut tempered by its unsavoury focus on Langham. As Sharpe says of some of the press, “they’ve misquoted him (and us sometimes) and twisted the truth”. Tragically this surges over how unexpectedly funny Black Pond is and how moving it becomes.

David Perilli: Directing has a reputation for being difficult for teams. Could you describe how you divided the job up between yourselves?

Tom Kingsley: On set, we just did whatever we could to support each other. There wasn’t time to plan our roles. We only had a crew of four, so that meant no assistant directors, no producer on set, no runners, no production designers, no make-up… no anything basically. We did have the odd disagreement before and after shooting, but they were always helpful to the film in the end.

Will Sharpe: And when we’re working on a project, we do talk about it and talk about it, which I think also helps. Every idea has to run the gauntlet, if you like. If it comes out on its feet at the other end, it’s a goer. I think, especially at the level we were working at, where both of us were playing so many different roles, having the support of somebody else was always invaluable. There were a lot of times where we’d be having a drink or something after a day’s editing, pretty square-eyed and exhausted and it would be like: ‘well at least I know that if I’m mad for trying to make this film, you must be mad too.’

DP:  Why did you choose to use the talking-heads / recollection structure for the film?

WS: After the main shoot, we cut a lot of stuff because we didn’t think it was good enough. What we were left with didn’t quite hang together as a satisfying narrative piece, so we got thinking about how best to make the film ‘complete’.

TK: My favourite idea was having a separate group of actors recreate the scenes of the whole film for Crimewatch, and then we cut between the recreation and the reality. But that was an example of one which might have been too complicated.

WS: In the end, we settled on the idea of doing these talking heads and we’re really glad we did. The film, in simplest terms, is about something strange happening to a family and the family, subsequently, discovering more about who they are. This was something that the cast were carrying as sub-text throughout the shoot, but when we shot the talking heads, it came out as all this wonderful new material. It really brought The Thompsons to life.

TK: We were worried that it might seem weird to add documentary footage into the mixture, but then we re-watched District 9, which is a brilliant film about aliens that happens to prove that as long as you’re telling a good story, you can use whatever medium you like. In a funny way, I think the film that most influenced Black Pond is probably District 9.

DP: The Simon Amstell role is crucial to the plotting (and quite good fun) but otherwise redundant in my view. Was he added after an earlier draft of the script? How did he get involved?

WS: Yes that strand was added later. I knew Simon from when I did stand up. So we showed him the stuff we’d shot and edited so far and explained how he’d fit in. He really liked the scenes so far and agreed to a day’s filming.

TK: I think Simon’s brilliant in the film – and again we just feel lucky that he agreed to trust us and go for it. It’s true that his comedy is tonally different from some of the other parts of the film, but we think that’s quite interesting.

DP: I love the image of the flooded motorway in the dream sequence. It’s all J. G. Ballard! And then the flickering Super-8 feel with the sound of a camera/projector flickering. Could you describe how you put this sequence together?

TK: Well we love Ballard, but actually that wasn’t the original plan. It changed as it went along. Will had written a dream sequence into the middle of the film. We didn’t shoot it with the flickering effect in mind – we’d planned it to look like one shot, with hidden cuts. But it was too long and actually wasn’t really that exciting. We tried out some other ideas and went with the flickering effect because we thought it was a bit like REM sleep. It also had the bonus that when it came to adding effects like the flooded motorway, I would only have to work on two frames. We tried to find a post house, but it was too expensive.

WS: So Tom taught himself After Effects to do all the stuff like adding snow, better skies, getting rid of reflections. We’d both taught ourselves to grade on ‘Cockroach’, so I took over the bulk of grading duties while Tom took charge of special effects. We knew we wanted the dream to look somehow different to the rest of the film so that, when it finished, the audience got a genuine sense of ‘waking up’ to the second half of the film. We tried the stock filters for ‘vintage’ footage etc but they all looked pretty tacky. After a while of experimenting and using different layers, we managed to create a look that was pretty close to actual Super 8.

TK: And it was a similar thing with Blake’s wife, who only ever appears in Super 8. We wanted to give the audience the option of thinking that perhaps she was a figment of his imagination. So that’s why she’s in the same format as the dream.

WS: We wanted her to haunt the film.

Watch Cockroach: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y5tKkPbsWRU

Sharpe and Kinglsey’s comment piece in the Independent on their decision to cast Chris Langham: http://www.independent.co.uk/opinion/commentators/will-sharpe-amp-tom-kingsley-chris-langham-was-our-first-choice-2364269.html

Black Pond is released on Friday 11 November 2011

Navigating a conversation with Mike Leigh is a tricky proposition. Short of stature and with a beard, his eyes droop within a rounded head. Words like avuncular may have been created specially to describe him. But when exchanging words you soon realise that a probing attention is at work. This is no uncle, he’s a quizzical headmaster! No, in fact he’s a film director, famed for bringing out outstanding performances from actors. And that requires an eye for detail in people. An eye pointed at me.

Every sentence, nay, word is analysed and potentially challenged. Phrases such as “I would suggest” or “that’s a very odd thing to say” soon litter our exchanges as the little inconsistencies in my questions reveal themselves and are in turn brought to my attention. Given Leigh’s reputation for bringing out the best in actors this comes as no surprise. If he’s doing this to me within minutes of our meeting what must it be like when he assembles a cast to make a new film!

Leigh is one of the country’s most well known and respected film directors. His career spans over thirty years including productions for Play for Today for the BBC such as Abigail’s Party and Nuts in May through films such as Life is Sweet and Secrets and Lies.

Leigh was in town to talk about Happy-Go-Lucky at the Cambridge Arts Picturehouse ahead of its national release on Friday 18 April. The film follows Poppy, a primary school teacher with a zest for life played by Sally Hawkins. Poppy takes up driving lessons after her bicycle is stolen and many of the film’s funniest scenes arise from her bubbly interaction with the emotionally sealed driving instructor Scott, who is played by Eddie Marsan.

I have two questions for Leigh: Is Mike Leigh happy? And can he drive?

For the first question – I don’t know. I couldn’t ask it directly but I have my suspicions. But the second answer is. “I passed my test in January 1967. I’ve owned a car ever since. Film directors who can’t drive are very far and few between.” Some of the funniest scenes in Mike Leigh’s new film Happy-Go-Lucky happen in driving lessons so it seemed like the right thing to ask.

Happiness however is a more serious matter. As one of the UK’s top film directors the main response to his new film has been abject surprise. The stereotype of a Mike Leigh film is usually some pristinely acted piece of pain slowly emerging over the duration. Vera Drake, his last film about a backstreet abortionist was just that. Although to be fair many of his films actually have quite contented characters confronting problems – the parents in Life is Sweet for example played by Jim Broadbent and Alison Steadman enjoy life.

Throughout the film the audience comes to know Poppy as she lives her life finding out just how nice she is. “It’s not a sort of mindlessly bland bliss.” as Leigh puts it. ”It’s about a woman who’s grounded and intelligent and who has a sense of humour. It’s positive and uplifting but there’s no need to talk about it just being ‘happy’ as a delirious mushroom munching condition”

Leigh’s films are well known for being constructed from improvisations created between him and the actors. “My job is to collaborate with the actors to create characters. Indeed “The contribution of each actor is major… a collaboration with another actor would yield up a different character.” So in this sense had Happy-Go-Lucky been made with another actress the outcome may have been very different indeed. Though as Leigh points out “Don’t forget I know that it’s Sally Hawkins I’m working with”. And that’s how some direction is preserved in what might appear at first to be a very improvisational method of making films. Mike Leigh films have an unmistakable style.

But returning to whether Leigh is happy himself. When asked about how characters from a previous film, High Hopes, might respond to the modern world he replies how disappointed they would be and that… “One of the motivating factors on my part for making Happy-Go-Lucky is how people of my generation remember the late 1960s. How disappointed we are in the way the world now is.”

So has Leigh made a film with a happy central character because he’s unhappy with the state of the world? “Although the world is in a terrible state there are people on the ground just getting on with it,” he says. ”And I thought it would be a good idea to make a film that confronted that positively. People like Poppy are being positive.” Perhaps in making his most upbeat film in years he’s really at his lowest ebb.

Article originally featured on Local Secrets

Faced with a film that according to the press notes takes the mantle from Eisenstein, Vertov and Lang, and allegedly reinterprets the very language of conventional film, the prospect of meeting the director of such work proffers scepticism, revelation and alarm in abundance. When one actually confronts the director in question you might expect an inscrutable demagogue pedalling his latest grand unified theory of the visual arts. Luckily not so Esteban Sapir, director of La antena, the opening night film at the Rotterdam International Film Festival 2007.

Sapir is a convivial Argentinian guy in his thirties who chats verbosely about his latest project which rather perversely may actually be the real deal. La antena could be described as a modern silent film shot in black and white but that wouldn’t really do it justice. It’s a fairy tale set in an austere snow bound metropolis where everybody has lost the ability to speak. In this silence a ruthless television station owner exploits the only lady left who can speak by broadcasting her songs to an envious city. So when pressed about the rather grand statements roaming around about his film Sapir is refreshingly frank. “There’s not one starting point. I had a lot of ideas that then became La antena.” But when pinned he falls back on “I wanted to tell a story only by seeing images. And that story I wanted to tell by images spoke about communication”. And rather beautifully and maybe even uniquely this is exactly what La antena does.

Nimbly name dropping Eisenstein, Vertov and Lang without really explaining their specific influences in a little more detail Sapir likens their use to a collage. Just like any other magpie maverick, reinvention is as much appropriation as it is innovation. “My intention was to experiment with film language. A lot of films only try to show what is written on a script. I didn’t want to do that I wanted to tell all this by images not by telling only a script. I wanted to go back to the silent movies where you had a text but it was in the image.”

La antena is a work that does indeed challenge film language with the same radicalism at heart as did the works of Dziga Vertov by giving a feature film a totally different approach to communication. But for all this talk of influential directors and film language, La antena owes considerable dues to comic books as the most exciting element of La antena are the inter-titles. For just as in most comics the characters in the film communicate using text, often in bubbles. “The text lives with the film. It’s part of the film. It’s not just text. It’s an object inside the film. It’s intention is given by the size and the movement of the text in the film. It’s like a comic but…”.

Beautifully, characters’ dialogue is actually part of their world allowing words to be manipulated and even manhandled. So, for example, people can disguise their conversation by concealing their words with a coat. Naturally for a film this visual it was all thought out in advance, reminiscent of Marvel comics in the 1960s or the graphic design of 1960s magazine Oz. “The design of the film was entirely drawn on storyboards frame by frame. At first I drew them and afterwards an artist drew it with me frame by frame. For each frame I thought a movement for the subtitles. But afterwards I saw the first tests of the film I took away most of them and left the ones that you see in the film.”

Personally, watching La antena put me in mind of Sin City, creation of Frank Miller, the prolific comic book writer responsible for Sin City, Batman: The Dark Knight Returns and 300 – a film about to burst upon our screens in the impending blockbuster season. Sapir acknowledges Miller as an influence and immediately mentions the budget of Sin City “Sixty million dollars! “. Despite budget differences it does indeed owe a debt to Frank Miller and many other comic artists because although not a comic book adaptation Sapir has made what may be the purest comic book film yet.

So when asked which comics in particular where influential to him Sapir happens to mention El Eternauta, or eternal traveller as it’s known in English, by Héctor Germán Oesterheld. El Eternauta has been described as one of the major comics of the twentieth century. I certainly hadn’t heard of it before this point but I’m not going to pretend to be anything more than a casual comic book fan. The premise is that aliens attack the earth, and specifically in the story Buenos Aires, by means of a deadly snow fall which kills all who it touches. A few survivors manage to avoid contact with the snow forming a short lived resistance before the protagonist is able to escape via time travel in an alien spacecraft. The Art Deco city in La antena, obviously linked to the expressionism of Fritz Lang and Friedrich Murnau, is snow bound too linking itself and Sapir to El Eternauta.

The Argentine New Wave was also associated with cities, but much more gritty realistic ones than the ones dreamt up by Oesterheld or Sapir in La antena. A feature on the FREPESCI website on South American cinema connects this group of filmmakers in the 1990s via their love of looking at transition through cities in different ways. Sapir was a prominent member of that movement with his début feature Fine Power (Picado fino) and other directors included Adrián Caetano, Bruno Stagnaro, Pablo Trapero, Diego Lerman and Martín Rejtman. Possibly the most well known of this bunch internationally might be Fabián Bielinsky, who’s film Nine Queens was marked with the dubious accolade of a US remake after much success.

Conventional categorisation of this wave has proved tricky due to its disparate nature generally resorting to terms like ‘cinema of orphans’ or descriptions of a gritty street bound aesthetic that merged documentary and fiction styles. Suffice it is to say Fine Powder was an integral part of it. By way of a sad epilogue reinforcing the sense of the ‘cinema of orphans’, Oesterheld himself became one in the disappeared when he too went missing in the mid 1970s.

Vertov aside, Fritz Lang probably has the biggest contribution to the look of La antena in its depiction of a cold temporally indefinite city that recalls Metropolis amongst other expressionist films. Sapir deliberately set out to make a self-consciously artificial world that resembled Lang’s work on the surface at least. “All the effects and the city are done like that for the people to know that they are done on cardboard…They don’t have the lack of perspective. I wanted that to be shown and noticed by the audience.” The cardboard approach also extends to the acting in the film. “Histrionics, overreactions – performance was all because they didn’t have words”.

Unfortunately the other Lang connection is less compelling, pushing post modernism a little too far in this context. One scene has a lady tied to a giant Swastika evoking the energisation of the robot maria. A companion scene later has a child tied to a large Star of David in opposition. It’s a jokey nod to Lang and his influences with a contemporary sense of irony of the battles going on here, not least in the set design but by using such potent symbols from the 20th century Sapir instantly provokes a reaction that potentially outweighs the allegorical elements of La antena. “Everybody asks that question! I used them as two very different icons: anti-Semitism and oppression… The oppressed and the oppressors.” He then wryly comments “…and the Nazis were the ones who invented television and propaganda”.

The notes of course don’t mention the most obvious contemporary Sapir has made for himself with La antena, Guy Maddin, whose work often mimics the old filmmaking practices with a knowingly camp wit. La antena although playful is considerably more serious. Sapir himself hadn’t seen any of Maddin’s work until after he’d finished shooting La antena “the director of photography gave me as a present for my birthday a film by Guy Maddin – The Saddest Music in the World – fantastic film I liked it”.

Lastly given the prominence of text in La antena, a major obstacle facing non-Spanish speaking audiences are the subtitles themselves. They are all in Spanish. Unlike a normal foreign language film overlaying subtitles on the film itself presents a problem as they will clash with the look of the inter-titles. At the screenings in Rotterdam subtitles were projected just below the screen adding to the common problem with visually commandeering films where you have to decide whether it’s more important to enjoy the picture make the compromise and occasionally read the subtitles from time to time to follow the dialogue. A small dilemma for watching such an inventive film.

Run by the indomitable Tony Jones, former programmer and co-founder of the City Screen arts cinema chain, the festival has steadily grown to the present day, screening quality titles and presenting cinema in new and unusual ways. In short it punches way above its weight.

In 2010 the festival celebrated its 30^th year. A strange fact when you realise that it started in 1977 – it took a few years off in the late 1990s. To celebrate this milestone I interviewed the original programmer David Jakes for the festival publication The Festival Daily in 2010. Owing to time pressure the interview never got published.

To put what follows into perspective local newspaper the Cambridge Evening News was advertising Smokey and the Bandit, The People that Time Forgot, A Star is Born, Steptoe and Son Ride Again and – best of all – Flesh Gordon (!) at the city’s commercial cinemas that week. As L. P. Hartley might have put it: the cinemas of the 1970s were a foreign country, they did things differently there.

David Perilli: What was cinema culture like in Cambridge in the 1970s?

David Jakes: Cambridge had a very very good reputation as a film city. It always did as far as I can remember. You had two or three commercial cinemas and you had two or three arthouse cinemas essentially, and if you put on a foreign film there were enough people in Cambridge. Tourism was nowhere near as busy as it is nowadays but it did attract people.

But I always felt that was fine during term time but in the summertime for two or three months there was always a dearth of films to see. Personally I was involved with the Cambridge University Film Society, and I had a bit of a background in booking films. I thought a film festival would be a good way to get started. An obvious place to do it was the Arts Cinema [originally on Market Passage, closed in 1999].

DP: How did you get involved with the Cambridge University Film Society?

DJ: That 1960 and 1970s era was quite interesting because the barriers between the university to people like me from the town were coming down. I was in there with various people who went on to become quite well known in the media industry. When I first got involved in the film society it was because they needed a treasurer. I was working in accounts at the time, and somebody mentioned it to me.

The first person I actually met was David Hare who was running the film society! In university circles in those days it had a very strong presence. It got visits from Alfred Hitchcock and various people would come because it was Cambridge. Young people were really interested in film. We held screenings in the Lady Mitchell Hall which could take 450 people.

DP: So potentially there could be more people at the film society than there were at the Arts Cinema?

DJ: That’s right, it could be a problem. I remember we did the first screening of a Wim Wenders film which never got screened at the Arts Cinema, The Goalkeeper’s Fear of the Penalty, which may have caused some ripples. The cinemas in those days did take notice about what was being done at the film societies at the university.

DP: How did you make the festival happen?

DJ: Obviously there was a market for arthouse films and of course you had lots of French, German and Spanish students. They had that culture of cinema, particularly in France, so there was an audience there. The Union Society itself was a meeting place for foreign students from all over the world. I could see that if I showed a film I could get an audience.

At the time the Arts Cinema was being run by a man named Eddie Block, and a girl whose name was Clare Holtham. She was the person who did all the background stuff in the cinema and I mentioned to her this idea and she said go and have a word with Eddie Block. He seemed interested but he wasn’t going to do it himself. So he said ‘you’ do it and start booking it, which is what I did.

I started booking the films and he gave us a few weeks. Obviously I didn’t have the experience of the distributors and all that stuff. So between us we got that first film festival put together.

DP: What was the first film you wanted to chase?

DJ: There were a number of films I was very interested in, Visconti, Kurosawa, the first film that we opened the festival with was Dodeska-Den, which is one of the first colour films that Kurosawa made. Another film we had at the time was Conversation Piece by Visconti; Bergman’s The Passion, another early colour film; the Mizoguchi film Chikamatsu Monogatari [The Crucified Lovers]; various films like that. Oh yes, Nagisa Oshima’s The Boy, that was one of the early films which I chased. I used people like Contemporary Connoisseur, that type of distributor. It was the first time I got films from more commercial distributors like Rank. Of course much of that stuff I did through the cinema because Eddie Block had all the contacts.

DP: How did the opening film go?

DJ: It wasn’t a sell-out. I would say that maybe 250 people, probably between a third and a half full. The film did get at least three or four more screenings during those two weeks. And certain films caught on, others didn’t. It was a successful run and they were happy with it in the end.

One of the popular films was a Swedish film by Bo Widerberg which is the Man on the Roof. That was one of the films. I think Oshima’s film Boy was popular. Films with a name did attract an audience. I hate to admit it but one popular one was something called the Bad News Bears!

DP: Do you have any major memories from the first festival?

DJ: My main memory is that we actually organised a kind of opening festival party at Emmanuel College and the festival itself received no funding from anybody. It was purely a commercial thing by contacting the distributors and agreeing the rates that we paid for the films. It had to pay for itself.

DP: So who was backing this?

DJ: Nobody!

DP: If it had made a loss what would have happened?

DJ: I don’t actually know the answer to that. I guess that the cinema, because Eddie Block was obviously taking a risk. But he knew that I had run and organised things and people did come to them. So it worked. I guess it was that they didn’t really have an established summer programme and I guess this seemed as good as anything.

We would show those films two or three times each. People liked it. It built up by word of mouth. Before each film was a series of short films by people like Godard and animations with a character called Mr Rossi. So it was building up a programme. I don’t think there was any chance that it would flop completely. In the end people came along and it did make a profit, about three or four thousand pounds.

DP: But back to the party…

DJ: John Cannon’s [One of the other festival organisers, formerly of Emmanuel College] wife is Polish and my wife is Icelandic, and they ended up making a spread of sandwiches or Scandinavian type food (for an opening film which was Japanese) and essentially we invited friends and contacts and the mayor. The other thing about that party was that we had a contact at the American air base in Alconbury where you could get goods at American prices so our supply of wine which was Californian Red Wine!

DP: Anything you would have done differently with 33 years of experience?

DJ: I don’t think we had any documentary films in the first series. It’s become a bigger part of the festival now but even at that time there was a great space which could have been filled, and when we could have shown some documentary footage because you didn’t get as much on television as you do now.

Further reading

Brief history of the Cambridge Film Festival

Short biography of Clare Holtham

One striking observation is the time delay for many of these films between production and exhibition at the festival in Cambridge. This may reflect the film society origins of the first festival as well as the much slower pace of film distribution at the time.

Dodeska-Den (Opening film)
Akira Kurosawa, Japan 1970
Kurosawa’s first film in colour, shown at the 1971 London Film Festival, but only recently bought for distribution. The film’s title is onomatopoeic and derives from the sound of a rattling streetcar. In many ways a reworking of his earlier ‘Lower Depths’, and described by Alexander Walker as ‘a film about the dreams and sorrows of shanty town life’.

A Passion
Ingmar Bergman, Sweden 1969
Bergman’s second colour film, in which four irredeemably isolated people act out their emptiness on Faro Island.

The True Nature of Bernadette
Gilles Carle, Canada 1971
Set in French Canada, the film is about a beautiful girl who deserts her stuffy husband in the city and takes her small son to live in the backwomds, where she dispenses love to one and all.

Conversation Piece
Luchino Visconti, Italy 1975
Visconti forsakes the grotesqueries of the past for home truths about living and dying in this story of an aging, remote art historian who takes on as lodgers a family of whirlwind eccentrics.

Poachers
Jose Luis Borau, Spain 1975
Beautifully photographed and strangely hothouse tale about the nasty things lurking in Spain’s political woods.

What’s Up Tiger Lily?
Woody Allen, USA 1966
Woody Allen redubs a Japanese martial arts thriller (Kizino Kizi) and creates what could be one of the most consistently funny films in which Allen has so far taken a hand. It predates his career as director, and has inexplicably taken a full decade to reach England.

Shadows of our Forgotten Ancestors
Sergei Parajanov, USSR 1964
This dazzling film by Armenian director Parajanov collected no fewer than sixteen international awards when it came out, but has since been seldom shown. Parajanov is a highly individual director, and his next film, The Colour of Pomegranates, was suppressed before it could reach the west. Parajanov himself was thrown into prison on a series of trumped up charges including homosexuality.

Pirosmani
Giorgi Shengelaya, USSR/Georgia 1971
Niko Pirosmani was a great Georgian primitive artist and Pirosmani is simply a beautifully made film about his life and times of neglect. This now celebrated film was largely responsible for putting Georgian cinema on the map. The cameraman, Konstantin Apryatin, has succeeded in using colour to create a visual style close to Pirosmani’s own.

Wild Game
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, Germany 1972
A disconcerting example of Fassbinder at his near best and near worst, made for TV just after The Bitter Tears of Petra Von Kant, and based on the Natalie Wood/James Dean relationship of Rebel Without a Cause and other Fifties teen romances, in order to wring some very bitter twists on that genre’s mythology.

Shadowman
Georges Franju, France 1973
A further excursion in Feuillade territory, made separately from his TV series based on the same characters.

The Boy
Nagisa Oshima, Japan 1969
Oshima’s black humoured, touching, and utterly unsentimental study of a child trained by his family to sustain fake injuries in traffic accidents.

Ludwig, Requiem for a Virgin King
Hans-Jürgen Syberberg, West Germany 1972
An extraordinary film based on the life of the mad king of Bavaria, and his progressive retreat into a fantasy world built upon the wildest excesses of German romanticism. A highly original work, hailed variously as ‘an indication of the possibilities of Brechtian cinema’, ‘an unequivocal masterpiece’ and ‘a harbinger of a new kind of cinema.’

Chikamatsu Monogatari
Kenji Mizoguchi, Japan 1955
Another recent resurrection of late Mizoguchi, based on a Kabuki play by Chikamatsu entitled The Anatomy of Love. It tells the story of an illicit amour fou that sweeps aside the relevance of the hierarchy of feudal Japan. Most interesting in comparison with Oshima’s Empire of the Senses.

Sunday Too Far Away
Ken Hannam, Australia 1964
One of the most interesting developments in world cinema recently has been the emergence of the Australian film. Sunday Too Far Away, along with Caddie, Mad Dog, The Cars That Ate Paris, Picnic at Hanging Rock and Devil’s Playground, is one of the films which have put Australian cinema on the map.

Illustrious Corpses
Francesco Rosi, Italy 1976
Nothing is so impressive in this, Rosi’s latest essay in political conspiracy theory, as the way it looks. In place of the journalistic roughness and drive of The Mattei Affair, this film has the air of a pageant – a mythically foreboding, politically obscure spectacle which proceeds to a final assassination with dreamlike inevitability.

Man on the Roof
Bo Winderberg, Sweden 1976
A hard-edged thriller from a most unexpected source, enhanced by Winderberg’s location shooting in crowded Stockholm, which gives the film a jagged sense of on the spot reporting.

The Bad News Bears
Michael Ritchie, USA 1976
After his discerning dissections of the ski industry, electioneering, and the beauty contest, Ritchie turns his attention to Little League Baseball.