Screen keen:

Comrie Film Fest

Award- winning documentaries, compulsive dramas, an Antipodean period piece, animation and a classic expressionist fantasy will all feature at West Perthshire’s bijou cinema celebration.

Comrie Film Festival’s fourth edition includes work from as far afield as the Balkans, Australia, Germany and the USA alongside home-based productions, with its diversity being reflected in the two-day event’s “north, south, east, west and beyond” theme for 2020.

Organised by Comrie Cinema and Events Club, the programme starts at 10.30am tomorrow with a screening of 2019 Oscar-nominated Macedonian docufilm Honeyland, which explores a range of environmental issues through its poignant study of a beekeeper in a remote mountainous village whose life is rocked by the arrival of a family of nomads next door.

It is followed at 12.15pm by the hourlong first episode of two-part BBC Scotland documentary Arctic Academy, which centres on a group of Scottish teenagers learning life skills by trekking across Greenland.

There’s also a chance to take in Australian director Jocelyn Moorhouse’s acclaimed 2015 revenge comedy-drama The Dressmaker, set in the outback in the 1950s and starring Kate Winslet. It starts at 2.15pm.

Comrie-basedartist Helen Mccrorie’s latest short, If Play Is Neither Inside Nor Outside, Where Is It?, looking at a group of children who have fun in the grounds of the village’s former cadet camp Cultybraggan, isbeingshownat4.45pm. It’ll be closely followed by beguiling silhouette animation Tso Tawo: The Spirit Stone, with Balquhidder filmmaker Leslie Mackenzie on hand to provide insights into an encounter with north- east India’s ancient Naga tribes.

Tomorrow’s line-up concludes at 8pm with 2018 psychological thriller The Vanishing, which stars the Comrie club’s patron Gerard Butler alongside Peter Mullan. Sunday’s programme has a free screening for kids at 9.30am in the shape of 3D computer-animated musical romp Rio, with the 2011 global money-spinner featuring the voices of such stars as Jesse Eisenberg, Anne Hathaway, Will.i.am and Jamie Foxx.

The 2017 British- made drama Lean On Pete – the story of a teenager who finds work caring for an ageing racehorse – is showing at 11.30am. A critical if not a commercial success, it stars Charlie Plummer as the boy who embarks on an odyssey across the new American frontier, alongside big names Chloë Sevigny and Steve Buscemi.

Attendees can quiz Polar Academy founder Craig Matheson and some of the ice wilderness adventurers following the screening of Arctic Academy’s second part at 2.30pm, before the festival’s finale.

The influential 1921 silent fantasy romance Destiny rounds off this year’s festivalat5pm, withliveaccompaniment from pianist Dmytro Morykit.

Life through a lens: The festival will include screenings of Lean On Pete, top, and Honeyland, above.