27th Cambridge Film Festival

Audiences hungry for engaging, diverse and entertaining cinema need look no further than the 27th Cambridge Film Festival for their summer-time fix. For eleven days in July, from 5-15, the Cambridge Film Festival returns with its audience-pleasing mix of over 200 screenings, including feature-length films and documentaries plus a huge shorts programme, offering genuine opportunities to discover unsung home-grown and international talent.

Also in the mix are sneak previews of future UK releases, silent classics with live music, family-friendly films and events, outdoor screenings, and ground- breaking artists moving image films.

On Tuesday 3 July, the Cambridge Film Festival is delighted to welcome Michael Nyman to launch the festival. Michael Nyman, one of the world’s most acclaimed composers, will be giving a solo performance at West Road Concert Hall accompanying a programme of films including Dziga Vertov’s Soviet newsreel Kino Pravda 21 (courtesy of the Austrian Film Museum), and Jean Vigo’s surrealist travelogue A Propos de Nice (1930), as well as performing music from his recent work The Piano Sings.

Festival Highlights:

The Cambridge Film Festival opens on Thursday 5 July with the UK Premiere of Pascale Ferran’s masterly Lady Chatterley, a sensual, poignant yet unsentimental love story, and winner of 5 Césars, including Best Film and Best Actress. Lady Chatterley spearheads a New French Cinema strand of eight features and documentaries including controversial filmmaker Bruno Dumont’s Flanders, winner of the Grand Jury Prize at Cannes 2006, Moliere, Laurent Tirard’s witty Gallic counterpart to Shakespeare In Love and Pierre Salvadori’s Priceless, a bittersweet comedy set on the French Riviera.

The Cambridge Film Festival has a history of unearthing new talent by actively encouraging filmmakers to submit films for inclusion. This year the festival received an unprecedented number of submissions: over 800 including 100 features and documentaries. Amongst the many impressive submissions, the festival has programmed 13 stand-out feature films and documentaries which will receive, in many cases their World Premiere.

Among them are Sol Papadopoulos’ Under The Mud, which The Guardian described as “the greatest film you’ll never see”; award-winning US filmmaker Seth Grossman’s excellent feature debut The Elephant King, and April Mullen and Tim Doiron’s zany mocu-documentary Rock Paper Scissors.

Audiences preferring their films to come with pedigree attached won’t be disappointed: Kenneth Branagh’s returns to directing – and to Shakespeare - with As You Like It, with an all-star cast including Brian Blessed who will attend the screening; Matthew Barney directs Drawing Restraint 9, described by the Hollywood Reporter as, “visually spellbinding”,with a soundtrack from Bjork; Adrienne Kelly’s romantic comedy The Waitress, an audience hit at the Sundance Film Festival, starring Keri Russell and Nathan Fillion; and festival and box-office favourite Lasse Hallström closes the festival with his latest film The Hoax with a star-studded cast including Richard Gere, Alfred Molina and Julie Delpy.

With the environment high on news - and film – agendas, the festival has put together a programme of 12 (including 6 UK Premieres) diverse documentaries and features that explore the past, present and future of our world.

From the displacement of indigenous peoples to a future without oil, from toxic clouds to an underwater adventure, Cinecology – the Environment on Film uses cinema as a platform to highlight this highly important cause.

Highlights include: Sharkwater, an award-winning documentary which debunks the historical stereotype of sharks as man-eating monsters; ten years in the making, Whale Dreamers, co-produced by Julian Lennon, follows a gathering of over eighty indigenous elders from tribes around the world to witness the Mirning Tribe’s traditional whale calling ceremony on a remote Australian cliff; and from the new crop of theatrical wildlife documentaries Artic Tale, from National Geographic Films and narrated by Queen Latifah, shows the affect climate change is having on the life-cycle of a walrus and a polar bear in the frozen Arctic wilderness.

The Cambridge Film Festival has long heralded German cinema, and this year’s New German Cinema strand is as vibrant as ever, with a very strong selection of six titles from contemporary filmmakers including two debut’s from young female directors to keep an eye on: Birgit Möller’s unsentimental yet moving feature debut Valerie, and Bettina Bülmner’s fast-paced and energetic documentary Pool of Princesses about three 15-year-old girls, Klara, Mina and Tanutscha who live and grew up together in Kreutzberg, the most multicultural district in Berlin.

Also screening is Chris Kraus’ labour of love Four Minutes, a project he started six years ago. Featuring astonishing performances from two of Germany’s leading actresses, Hannah Herzsprung and Monica Bleibtreu, Four Minutes won multiple awards at the recent German Film Awards.

Other highlights to look out for include: a free outdoor screening on Parker’s Piece of the BFI National Archive restoration of Dracula (1958) starring Christopher Lee and Peter Cushing; live music and film events from silent cinema through to Youthmovies an improvised audio-visual collaboration between Oxford's Youthmovies & Jonquil, “soundclashing and soundtracking a skewed scattershot smattering of their favourite kiss scenes, set pieces and big finale's from the last twenty years of teen films'; the History of Children’s TV and Film including Gerry Anderson, vintage 1960s Daleks and classic episodes of Watch With Mother; revivals including The Sound of Music and Last Tango In Paris; Film4 FrightFest Xtra Day on Saturday 7 July with five gems including Maurice Devereaux’s play on modern paranoia End of the Line; Hell’s Ground, the first modern horror film to be shot in Pakistan, plus a rare revival of the old-school 1980 horror and gore pic Motel Hell, only seen once before in the past 25 years on the big screen.

And just to prove there’s always room for experiment, the Cambridge Film Festival is screening, directly from Cannes, Straight 8, a unique event which challenged anyone brave enough to shoot a three minute film on a single cartridge of super 8, edit in camera and then create a separate soundtrack – never having seen the film!

Says Festival Director Tony Jones “Cambridge is one of the most important festivals in the UK calendar and we’re proud to programme films which appeal on many levels to many different people. Audience led festivals like the Cambridge Film Festival are often the only chance film enthusiasts get to discover international and local gems, whether contemporary or classic, and I’m glad that the festival continues to deliver this kind of diversity.

“Filmmakers also recognise that festivals like Cambridge provide an invaluable platform and we’re looking forward to welcoming so many new filmmakers to the festival this year. So 2007 promises to be another exciting year!”

The 27th Cambridge Film Festival takes place from 5-15 July 2007 at the Arts Picturehouse, 38/39 St Andrews Street, Cambridge, CB2 3AR. Plus additional screenings at Cineworld and The Junction. The full film and events programme will be released by Monday 25 June. For more information, visit Cambridgefilmfestival.org.uk.