BRIT 4: England Made Me
The Brit 4: England Made Me programme might be best summarised as 'stories from twenty-first century Britain', since they all have an unmistakeable sense of exisiting in the here and now. Fyzal Boulifa, who directed the much-celebrated Whore (2008), returns to the subject of the country's mix of racial identities with Burn My Body (2011), this time focusing on Hana, a young British Muslim rebelling against her father's insistence that she cover herself with the hijab whilst out in public. Whilst this film uses cross-generational conflict to offer a timely meditation on multi-culturalism, Michael Pearce's Rite (2010) uses it as a launchpad to explores changing notions of class identity, a an alienated father-son relationship illustrating shifting social mores and values.
Image: Burn My Body
This theme is also evident in Tom Stewart's When The Dust Settles (2010), in which a young man made good returns to the small seaside town in which he grew up in order to attend a funeral, onnly to be met with resentment and snobbery from the mistrustful locals. Progressing largely wordlessly, the film seems to capture the wistful yet stifling ambience of dead-end seaside town and the heaviness of its salty air, while reflecting on the elasticity of memory and the transience of what constitutes 'home'.
Image: When the Dust Settles
No film at the festival will have more relevance to current global events than Andrew Kötting's An History of Civilisation (2011), in which the typically idiosyncratic director juxtaposes long static shots of a children's May Day funfair in the shadow of the skyscraping financial buildings of Canary Wharf with a soundtrack of spoken readings of Mao Tse-Tung quotations interspersed with fairground music. It is a piquant combination, and given the current apparent crisis of capitalism, invites speculation about what kind of future these children will inherit, or indeed take part in shaping themselves. Also apt in regard to recent events is Nick Scott's Big Society (2011), which warps David Cameron's flagship policy initiative in order to suggest an alternative way of mending so-called 'Broken Britain', though William Jewell's Man In Fear (2011) might suggest that the real problem with society lies with another, hidden menace - murderous conceptual artists.
Image: An History of Civilisation
Finally, Pitch Black Heist (2011), which reunites Man on a Motorcycle (2009) director John Maclean with that film's star, current man of the moment Michael Fassbender. If Robbie Ryan's starkly beautiful black-and-white cinematography is reminiscent of Robby Müller's work on Down By Law (1986), then so too is there a sense of Jarmuschian languorousness and a feeling of anti-generic mischief. As Fassbender and co-star Liam Cunningham's would-be thieves embark on their distinctly unglamorous, inept and increasingly beer-soaked heist preparations they begin to feel more akin to Vladimir and Estragon than any of Ocean's Eleven, and the job - with its payload of seemingly abstract value and the neccesity for it to be undertaken in absolute darkness - is a cinematic heist quite unlike any other.
