Hello everyone... Nina here to present another installment of "Across the Pond," Dominique Taylor's semi-regular column focusing on the UK entertainment scene. This week, Dominique is fresh from the preview of The History Boys, where she had a chance to meet the director and the titular "boys".
"Red Road" to London Film Festival
By Dominique Taylor
This week sees the opening of the 50th London Film Festival. The event is organised by the British Film Institute and will showcase over 500 films from more than 50 countries over the next two weeks. However, it is not the festival as a whole I want to focus on this week, but more one of the films that it will be screening: Andrea Arnold’s Red Road, a film set in Glasgow which tells the story of a CCTV operator who is forced to confront her past when a figure from it appears on camera.
Andrea has already won an Academy Award for her short film Wasp, and her latest offering is seemingly as popular, winning the Prix Du Jury at Cannes. But this film is not entirely Andrea’s. Instead it is part of ‘Advance Party’, a project thought up by Lars von Trier, which has challenged three directors to come up with three different films using the same group of characters. Andrea’s is the first and she told a local paper, Bexley Express: “I wrote three treatments and asked everyone involved to pick the treatment they liked most. They all picked the darker one. This became Red Road.”
Sigma Films in Glasgow and Zentropa in Denmark, who have a long-running relationship of co-production, are fronting the project and BAFTA winner Morag McKinnon and Danish director Mikkel Norgaard will direct the next two films. They are both to be set in Scotland and there are strict rules that the project must be finished in six weeks (an element that caused major problems for Andrea who was shooting in winter).
Red Road will be released across the UK by Verve Pictures on 27 October, or, of course it can be caught at the London Film Festival. Watch this space for information on the next two instalments or visit www.sigmafilms.co.uk. I’m confident good things happen in threes.
You can also check out news from the London Film Festival at www.bfi.org.uk.
Thanks Dominique! After reading this, I did some poking around and found a very nice interview with Andrea Arnold over at Guardian Unlimited.
