welcome to the
29th Chichester International Film Festival! Artistic Director Introduction We are delighted to open and close this year’s Festival with two cracking new British films. We welcome Timothy Spall to introduce the UK premiere of ‘The Last Roger Gibson Bus’, a road movie with a difference. ‘The Duke’ is our closing gala, a glorious Ealing-type comedy starring Jim Broadbent and Helen Mirren, and we hope the director Roger Michell (‘Notting Hill’) will introduce his film. Other British films include ‘Censor’, ‘Minamata’, ‘Limbo’, ‘The Nest’ and the UK premiere of ‘The War Below’, an independent production about miners planting bombs in the trenches. Neil Monaghan will introduce his controversial political thriller ‘Election Night’. The lion’s share of the Festival goes to European Cinema, and I am particularly pleased to have imported eight major UK premieres via the Berlinale (online) Festival in February and September’s glorious Venice Festival all with physical screenings. Watch out for ‘Unidentified’ (Romania); ‘Code:
Steve McQueen’s ‘Small Axe’ ‘La Fine Fleur’ (pictured below left) on the streets promoting the premiere of the film. The strength of French films is reflected in a sub-strand of European Cinema ‘Vive la France’ containing ten new films including from our partner the Institute Français’ with the superb ‘De Gaulle’, and the wickedly funny and politically incorrect ‘Simply Black’. In our ‘Window on the World’ selection of ten films from the same number of countries, I would like to highlight the remarkable debut feature ‘The Badger’ – a thriller set in presentday Iran, ‘Souad’ from Egypt, and perhaps the most controversial film in the Festival, ‘New Order’ from Mexico, where a violent class struggle erupts during a lavish high society wedding – not for the squeamish!
An Evening of Billie Holiday
‘The Rose Maker’ in Cannes Karim’ and ‘Fellinopolis’ (Italy); ‘Dawn of War’ (Estonia); ‘Helene’ (Finland); ‘Merkel’ (Germany); and three from France: ‘Django’, the mouth-watering ‘Delicieux’ about the first pre-revolutionary restaurant in France, and ‘The Rose Maker’. In fact as I pen this in Cannes, I noticed the poster display of
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Moving on to the specialized strands, in the ‘Black Directors Matter’ collection, we are particularly proud to be showing all of Steve McQueen’s five ‘Small Axe’ TV masterpieces, with kind permission from the BBC – surely the greatest achievement of last year’s television. Also, part of this strand is the fantastic Harlem musical documentary, ‘Summer of Soul’. Our popular annual focus on Jazz presents a marvellous array of three live jazz gigs plus related documentaries with ‘An Evening with Spike Wells and his QOW trio’, ‘An Evening with Billie’, featuring sensational vocalist Vimala Rowe. Supporting the French film ‘Django’ will be the gypsy jazz duo ‘Balcon Manouche’ giving
