Cheltenham International Film Festival celebrated its fifth anniversary in 2023… Cheltenham International Film Festival celebrated its fifth anniversary in 2023. Festival No.5 was our most successful to date in terms of creative accomplishments, audience participation, public awareness. One of the proudest accomplishments was the launch of our CineYouth programme, drawing in and reaching out to youth across town with a programme of film screenings and events. It is now fair…

CineYouth Launched on several fronts… CineYouth launched on several fronts. We selected a programme of short films from young filmmakers and edited them into one feature length screening called “On The Dark Side” at The Everyman. Demand was such that we quickly had to programme a second screening on the same day attended by students from the University of Gloucestershire. Feedback from the young attendees was very positive. It is…

If Ladies of Steel is anything to go by, Finnish songs are extraordinarily gloomy. Birthday songs, love songs, patriotic songs, songs of celebration: they are all as miserable as sin. And yet, the nation has a knack of producing strong comedies and Ladies of Steel (available until 21 June at 19:30) is one of those. Old people in films are either the butt of jokes or they are feisty battlers,…

How many British children, inner-city children especially, have ever seen a circus? It’s different on the continent, where around 2,000 troupes travel around constantly. Nonetheless, this ancient art-form lives on in illustration, story-telling and idiom. Do people still say they are going to “run away with the circus”? Let us hope so, because that is the promise held out in Nevia, a rather lovely Italian film that is available until…

We all know there is a lot of bad behaviour in the online world. But does new technology simply allow bad people to behave badly more efficiently? Or is there is something inherently corrupting about the screen-based life – a subject dear to all our hearts after months of lockdown?   It would have been easy for the five directors of Selfie, a hilarious French portmanteau or anthology film that…

  The five Italian films we have selected for this year’s Country Focus illuminate the country’s proud record of innovation and passionate engagement. Lucania, which made its first appearance yesterday (8 June) but will continue to be available until Saturday at 8.30pm, is the story of a young mute girl who lives with her embattled father on his run-down farm. When he is menaced by local thugs, she uses her…

We hear a lot about mental health these days. Countless television and radio campaigns and reassuring magazine and newspaper articles explain how to maintain your equilibrium by simple emotional and physical practices. Less is said about serious mental illness. No-one was ever cured of hearing voices or experiencing delusions by chatting to friends or taking a walk in the park. Cinema, on the other hand, has always been interested in…

On Monday at 7.00pm, Cheltenham International Film Festival will be showing Walking on Water, a documentary about the artist Christo Vladimirov Javacheff, known simply as Christo, and his extraordinary project to build a floating walkway across an Italian lake. This is poignant, because Christo died last Sunday, 31 May, at the age of 84. The artist worked with his wife Jeanne-Claude Denat de Guillebon until her death in 2009. The…