After a 2013 absence I am now here, having descended from Beyond the Wall through the icy North, to make wholly inappropriate Game of Thrones references on a film website.
Having breezed in from Edinburgh on Friday morning, the festival was already typically in full swing. Within an hour of sitting down in the bar I’d been cajoled into doing an Arts Picturehouse video blog, and gently teasing out details from my head for a review of NIGHT MOVES, which I’d seen at Tribeca and had partially forgotten about. My illegible notes were difficult to decode, but I did recall it was a tightly wound, quietly engrossing film. Although its festival screenings are past, it’s worth catching if it has showings near you.
We don’t so much have desks, as rumours of a desk. A bit like a chipboard big-foot
It also wasn’t long before one of the great cinematic injustices had been wreaked upon the media office at CFF: TAKE ONE’s table was stolen for an event elsewhere. Sadly, this has become a fairly frequent occurrence over the years: if you’ve worked CFF for TAKE ONE, then the concept of a laptop is pretty literal. We don’t so much have desks, as rumours of a desk. A bit like a chipboard big-foot.
However, in the absence of a working space it does give me more chance to actually see the films, which should rather be the point. Having seen it today, it’s worth catching the second screening of I BELIEVE IN UNICORNS on Sunday at 6.15. Playing out like a modern and realistic fairytale, Leah Meyerhoff’s film is a captivating and tonally original coming-of-age tale. From the perspective of the teenage Davina (a superb performance by Natalia Dyer), not only is it an engaging tale but one with an imaginative sensibility and a point of view that is too often overlooked or dumbed down.
The headline act of the second half of my day will be INFERNO in the Retro 3D strand, which we hope to have some more features on over the next few days. HOUSE OF WAX in particular underwent a painstaking process of restoration, to overcome damage to the negatives. The process involved 4K scans of the three Technicolor strips for each eye, giving six in total. The end result is superb, and all from the single-eyed Andre De Toth.
Although there’s rarely been a minute to catch a film since I got here, the beauty of it all is there’s usually some other gem just around the corner.