EIFF diary
The EIFF draws to a close today and besides tonight’s gala screening of After Yang that means there’s a gong to be handed out in the form of the Powell & Pressburger Award for Best Feature Film.
Seasoned festival-goers will note the rebrand: no longer the Michael Powell Award, it now reflects the internationalism of his partnership with Hungarian co-director, writer and producer Emeric Pressburger and in turn fulfils a broader remit, meaning not just British films are under consideration and not just straightup dramas either.
That’s a smart move given that Powell’s films – especially those he made with Pressburger – never felt limited by anything as crude as a border, certainly not the sort that narrows the imagination. Watch the restored version of 1943’s The Life And Death Of Colonel Blimp and it still feels like stumbling into a technicolour idyll of a film-making future where convention has no place.
That’s reflected in many of the ten nominees for this year’s award, including Flux Gourmet from Peter Strickland, a British expat who decamped to Hungary to escape the insular stuffiness of many of his peers and who has created one of the most distinctive bodies of work of any British film-maker, period. It’s reflected in Will
Anderson and Ainslie Henderson’s moving, semi-animated meta-documentary A Cat Called Dom, and in Filipino director Martika Ramirez Escobar’s wildly inventive action movie Leonor Will Never Die (my fave discovery of the festival).
It’s also there in the metaphysical erotic drama 99 Moons, which challenges cinema’s increasing reluctance to unabashedly explore and portray sex on screen without signposting how you’re supposed to feel about the characters. Writer/director Jan Gassmann told me: “It’s nice to present a movie like this in such a diverse programme.” Amen to that.