Hamilton’s 33rd International Film Festival

Hamilton’s 33rd International Film Festival will be starting on the 25th of August.  I’ve lost count of the amount of times that I’ve written articles like this promoting past festivals.  The sad reality is that few students take the opportunity to sample the best world cinema has to offer during this annual event.  Exactly why I’m not entirely sure.  Cost is a factor, of course, but there’s always enough money for beer and cigarettes.  Shortage of time is another excuse, but this year as in the past, the festival falls during a teaching recess.  I’d like to think that the real reason has nothing to do with a lack of interest or intellect within the student body.  Is it really necessary to make a case for movies made outside of north America, some of which might be in a language other than English, black or white or even - perish the thought - silent?  Get out of your comfort zone, for fuck’s sake.

Right, enough negativity.  I suggest that you all make the effort to pick up a Festival programme from either Auteur House or Lido Cinema and be seduced by the dazzling array of celluloid riches described therein.  What follows below is my personal selection from the 57 features and untold shorts that are screening over 18 days.  You should make your own selections, get up off your arse and see something.

Opening Night: Always good for the free booze and nibbles if not the movie itself.  “The Guard” sounds like a fun, Irish variation on the buddy cop film, with Brendan Gleeson, everyone’s favourite fat mick.  What’s Gaelic for “we’re too old for this shit”?

26 August: “13 Assassins” - the prolific if inconsistent Japanese maestro Takashi Miike delivers a sword fighting epic set in 1844.  More than one review invokes Kurosawa’s name when discussing this one.  That’s good enough for me.

27 August: “Arrietty” - another side of Japanese cinema, that of Studio Ghibli cell animation.  Though not directed by Hayao Miyazaki the master had a hand in its planning and wrote the screenplay, based on the classic British children’s book “The Borrowers”.

30 August: “Happy, Happy” - timely proof that there’s more to Norway than trigger happy neo-Nazis this sex farce about wife-swapping Scandinavians is bound to be easy on the eyes.

31 August: “Tabloid” - Errol Morris, the world’s most celebrated documentarian, enjoys himself reconstructing a 1970s scandal in which a beauty pageant winner forcibly seduced a Mormon missionary.

2 September: “The Kid with a Bike” - two time Cannes winners the Dardennes brothers offer another drama about the inarticulate and the powerless in search of love.  This time the protagonist is an 11 year old boy.

2 September: “The Trip” - British comics Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon play versions of themselves, going on a restaurant tour around the home country, getting drunk and one-upping each other with jokes and impersonations.

3 September: “Meek’s Cutoff” - an alternative, revisionist Western from “Wendy and Lucy” director Kelly Reichardt.  The wagon train experience with feminist slant and open ending.

3 September: “Le Havre” - a French comedy from the Finnish master of the dead-pan, Aki Kaurismaki.  Minimalist poignancy with a subtle social agenda.

6 September: “Fire in Babylon” - a documentary on the rise of West Indian cricket in 1970s.  Manages to somehow omit details about the team’s sulky antics in New Zealand in 1980 but otherwise inspirational.

7 September: “Project Nim”: chimpanzee raised as human.  Crazy.

10 September: “Metropolis” - the latest (dare we say last?) restoration of Fritz Lang’s 1927 classic.  It might not be the best silent made by the eye-patched Kraut but it’s certainly the most famous.

Closing Night: “Melancholia” - Great Dane Lars Von Trier bounces back from the clitoral-snipping madness of “AntiChrist”, contemplating the end of the world or at least yet another bloody movie wedding scene.