London Film Festival - British Cinema

13 October 2008

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As well as looking at some of the most established filmmaker and actor the London Film Festival will also focus on some of the best new British talent.

Here is what to look out for.

Awaydays

On the Wirral in the grim early years of Margaret Thatcher�s premiership, the opportunities for thrill-seeking young men looking to escape 9 to 5 drudgery are what they�ve always been: sex, drugs, rock n� roll, fashion, football and fighting.

Paul Carty (Nicky Bell) goes to the game, chases skirt, pores over records in the racks at Probe, and gets to see Echo and the Bunnymen, but his fraught family life and dull job leave him feeling bereft.

Becoming mates with the Berlin Bowie romantic Elvis (Liam Boyle), Carty is drawn to The Pack, a faction of football hooligans who own the terraces, a gang that Elvis is finding hard to distance himself from.

Endearing himself to The Pack�s General, John Godden (Stephen Graham), Carty throws himself into a world of boozy train journeys, Stanley knives and savage violence.-London Film Festival

Franklyn

A British science fiction movie written and directed by Gerald McMorrow, his first feature debut as director, bringing together Ryan Phillippe, Eva Green and Sam Riley.

The film is a split narrative set simultaneously in contemporary London and in a future metropolis ruled by religious fervor. It's the story of four lost souls, divided by two parallel worlds, on course for an explosive collision when a single bullet will decide all their fates.

Jonathan Preest (Ryan Phillippe), an atheist vigilante who has vowed revenge on Meanwhile City�s leader; Emilia (Eva Green), a privileged young artist whose difficult relationship with her mother fuels her cynicism and depression; Milo (Sam Riley), a sensitive young man whose heart has been recently broken; and Peter (Bernard Hill), a deeply religious man who has come to London in search of his missing son, a troubled Gulf War veteran

Bronson

Much anticipated and destined to court controversy, Nicolas Winding Refn�s (The Pusher Trilogy) portrait of notorious lifer and the UK�s �most violent prisoner�, Charles Bronson, is an ambitious and brave attempt to create a biopic of a man who has spent 34 years of his life in prison, and 28 of those in solitary confinement.

Whilst confronting the extreme brutality which has characterised Bronson�s life, Winding Refn endeavours to get to the heart of such a desperate existence. Born Michael Peterson, Bronson�s ambition was simply to be famous.

With a limited sphere of opportunities, the criminal world offered a theatre in which he could cultivate his stylised persona.

Winding Refn deftly shows how Bronson creates a warped alternate reality and stages himself within it, raising the critical question that in creating Bronson the Philosopher, the Artist and the Joker what is left of the real man.-London Film Festival

Love Live Long

When Oscar�-nominated Mike Figgis (Leaving Las Vegas) was invited to film the Gumball Rally, the famous high-speed race in Istanbul, he decided instead to craft a raw and intimate film that exposes the effects of an unexpected sexual encounter and the high stakes of the race on two strangers.