Cheltenham International Film Festival is delighted to offer four films – Free To Watch – from the Festival’s 2020 festival programme which was put online in June; CIFF.Shift72.com.  The four films, Days of the Bagnold Summer, Lost Transmissions, The Beautiful Game and One More Jump are not…

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…

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…

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…

  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…

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…

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…