10/04/2008

Berlin is hosting the British and Irish Film Festival britspotting (April 10-16), which kicks off today.

The event – which was founded in 2000 and is organised in collaboration with the British Council – aims to promote young UK talent by giving audiences and professionals the chance to see recent films that have not yet found a distributor in Germany.

Titles in competition include Marian Quinn’s 32A [+see also:
trailer
film profile] (Best Debut Film at the Galway Film Festival), which traces the experiences of four teenage pupils in a catholic school in Dublin, as they discover puberty and the wild insouciance of the 1970s; and Justin Edgar’s Special People, a British-style black comedy in which a pompous director on the edge of a nervous breakdown tries to make a film about a skeptical group of handicapped children.

Other titles include Rupert Wyatt’s debut film The Escapist, an original prison escape story set to a background of Leonard Cohen and Coldplay, which won acclaim at the Sundance Festival; and Mark Jenkin’s The Waiting Room, which was lauded by critics and audiences at the latest Edinburgh Film Festival.

britspotting will also screen, in avant-premiere, Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges [+see also:
trailer
film profile], starring Colin Farrell, Brendan Gleeson and Ralph Fiennes (see interview); and recent box office successes such as Shane Meadows’ This Is England [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and the London satire Chromophobia by Martha Fiennes, starring Kristin Scott Thomas and Penelope Cruz.

Young directors feature heavily in the line-up, but works by established filmmakers also make an appearance. Audiences in Berlin will be able to discover Ken Loach’s It's a Free World [+see also:
trailer
film profile] and Stephen Frears’ The Deal (2003).

The full programme of enticing titles, which also includes documentaries, shorts and special sections, is available on the festival website.

(Translated from French)