Programme to put a smile on your face (From Hereford Times)

Seventh Borderlines FIlm Festival opens on March 19

1:14pm Monday 16th March 2009 in Local Film

BORDERLINES’ seventh film festival opens across the region next week, with a programme that promises to brighten up our lives with the mix we’ve come to expect of movies big and small, from Oscar winners to films made on shoestring budgets, from hard-hitting and thought-provoking to laugh-out-loud movies.

Jo Brand called Borderlines a “great festival”, Monty Don described it as “inspirational” and Barry Norman said it was “beautifully balanced” – while Monty Python’s Terry Jones said it was a lot better than “staying in with the small screen”.

This year’s Borderlines Film Festival, which opens in village halls across the region from Thursday, March 19, promises to amuse and entertain again as it has for the past six years.

For 18 days, Hereford’s Courtyard, Ludlow’s Assembly Rooms and about 30 village halls, from Gorsley to Garway, will screen more than 70 contemporary and classic films.

“We’ve planned an international programme of films with cracking comedies to put a smile on your face,” said festival director David Gillam.

Several of this year’s Oscar winners will be screened, including The Reader, which gained Kate Winslet three leading actress awards this season and earned Knighton-based Chris Menges an Oscar nomination for best cinematography.

The actor Pete Postlethwaite will be on hand for a screening of The Age of Stupid, his new, hard-hitting film on climate change, while recent BAFTA award-winning director James Marsh hopes to introduce Man On Wire at Dorstone Village Hall.

The Age of Stupid is at the heart, too, of this year’s Borderlines debate – Climate change and sustainability – which takes place on Friday, March 27, at The Courtyard and ends with a screening of two short films and a discussion, How to Effect Change?

The Film and Disability Day returns for the fifth year on Thursday, April 2, and in keeping with its status as the UK’s largest rural film festival, agriculture is represented with screenings of Food & Farming in Herefordshire and Fieldwork – Farming Memories from the 20th Century.

For lovers of comic movies, there’s the charming Caught in the Act, about a Welsh village doing dubious deals with EU subsidies, and Burt Reynolds drawn into village theatricals in A Bunch of Amateurs.

Old rock stars make the big screen in the hilarious new Anvil! The Story of Anvil, while the redoubtable band of pensioners in Young at Heart churn out the rock hits that will put a smile on your face and a song in your heart.

Directed by Woody Allen and starring another Oscar winner, Penelope Cruz, the witty Vicky Christina Barcelona forms part of Borderlines’ Old Masters season, which also screens Liver-pudlian Terence Davies’ Of Time and the City, Gus Van Sant’s Milk (Sean Penn, in a role that has won him the Oscar for leading actor, plays gay rights campaigner Harvey Milk) and the gipsy farce by Emir Kusturica: Black Cat, White Cat.

Black Cat, White Cat accompanies Sites and Rights, a short film from the Rural Media Company about gipsies and travellers in the West Midlands.

Sites and Rights was filmed by Suckley cameraman Mike Jackson and Borderlines is to showcase the work of other regional film makers.

John Bulmer is expecting a full house after his sell-out session last year; ex-Hereford College of Art student Sam Oliver screens Moja Moja, his shoestring budget film about a Kenyan orphanage; Shrewsbury’s Natasha Carlish joins producer Samm Haillay to talk through Better Things, about the blight of heroin addiction in the Cotswold countryside.

Malvern’s Neil Oseman, meanwhile, will screen a pilot from his fantasy action feature, The Dark Side of the Earth starring Kate Burdette (The Duchess) and Benedict Cumberbatch (The Other Boleyn Girl).

Borderlines runs across Herefordshire, Shropshire, Gloucestershire, Worcestershire and Powys until Sunday, April 5. Full details can be found at borderlinesfilmfestival.co.uk