FILM / Letting in the third man: Sheila Johnston finds plenty of good films still to be seen at the London Film Festival, and outlines some special offers
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Your support makes all the difference.The London Festival closes this Sunday with Chen Kaige's Farewell to My Concubine. The screening is sold out, alas, but the film is opening in the West End in January. Meanwhile seats are still available for a number of interesting films, including a last-minute addition, the Orson Welles documentary It's All True] (see ticket offer, below).
Particularly recommended are Rolf de Heer's bizarre black comedy Bad Boy Bubby (today 4pm NFT1); Pixelvision, a programme of the growing body of work shot on the Fisher- Price 'toy' camera (tonight 8.30pm MOMI) and Another Girl Another Planet, a feature film using Pixel technology (tomorrow 6.45pm MOMI); and Dream Girls, a fascinating documentary about Japan's all-female Takarazuka Revue, where women take the male roles and romantic fantasies about the ideal man are given free, rich play. (Tomorrow 3.45pm NFT1) Bookings can be made at the National Film Theatre box-office (071-928 3232) or at the ticket booth on Leicester Square.
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FREE TICKETS
WE HAVE five pairs of free tickets for each of the following films. They await the first readers to present a copy of this page at the Festival box-office today after 10.30am. Offer strictly subject to availability and limited to one pair of tickets per reader. Seats are also still on sale for all these screenings.
From the French writer-director Agnes Merlet, the acclaimed Shark's Son is a kind of junior Les Valseuses, in which two wild young brothers go on the run in a journey to nowhere much. It's a tough, unsentimental film which observes their misadventures, without moralising but with great compassion. (Tonight 7pm French Institute)
The Secret Adventures of Tom Thumb is a real oddity, a mix of model animation and live action from the Bristol- based Boxelbrothers. It's a macabre, adult, 'post-industrial' version of the classic fairytale, with the tiny Tom wandering forlornly through a derelict, futuristic, bug-infested world which looks like a cross between Eraserhead and Delicatessen. (Tomorrow 1.45pm NFT1)
The Mexican / Spanish film Dollar Mambo is set in a Latin American cabaret teeming with comedians, magicians, musicians and acrobats - a vibrant local popular culture that is shattered when war suddenly breaks out. (Tomorrow 5pm Electric Cinema)
A last-minute addition to the Festival, It's All True] is a painstaking reconstruction of Orson Welles' ill-fated 1942 trip to Brazil to shoot a documentary as part of the US government's Good Neighbour Policy at the start of World War II. Coming hard on the heels of Citizen Kane, as Welles had just completed shooting The Magnificent Ambersons, the visit heralded the beginning of the end of a meteoric career. It's All True] includes interviews with Welles and his collaborators, documents the trip and weaves in footage from the uncompleted film. (Sunday 11am Lumiere Cinema)
Simeon is the third film from the gifted Martinique director Euzhan Palcy (after Rue Cases Negres and A Dry White Season). This new piece is a light-hearted fantasy about the adventures of a Creole music group in Guadeloupe and in Paris, seen through the eyes of a 10-year-old girl. (Sunday 4.30pm Electric Cinema)
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