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Festival (2005)
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Writer/director Annie Griffin (creator of Channel 4 sitcom The Book Group) makes her feature debut with this comedy that follows a motley band of stars and misfits in their attempts to survive the annual Edinburgh Fringe Festival. Faith Myers (Lyndsey Marshal) is a first-timer with an earnest one-woman show about Dorothy Wordsworth. She shares a hall with Brother Mike (Clive Russell) and his show about paedophile priests. Meanwhile, journalist Joan Gerard (Daniela Nardini) and big-name comedian Sean Sullivan (Stephen Mangan) are judges for the comedy award and make the most of that opportunity to sleep with the contestants. As she did with her TV series, Griffin blends drama and black comedy, spiky Scottish characters and seemingly sophisticated foreigners to produce something that confounds expectations, challenges stereotypes and leaves viewers unsure whether to laugh or cry. For the most part, these shifts in tone work, though the sex scenes are uncomfortably frank. The film also owes something of a debt to Robert Altman's multi-stranded Nashville and its cast of similarly self-obsessed performers. BP
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| Contains swearing. |
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Tell us what you think
Email us at rtfilmcomments@bbc.co.uk to tell us what you think of this film. Your comments may appear in Radio Times magazine.
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Running time
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102mins
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Country of origin
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UK
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Genre
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Black comedy Drama
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Original language
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English
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Screenplay
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Annie Griffin
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Theatrical distributor
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Pathé
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UK cinema certificate
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18
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UK cinema release date
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July 2005
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| awards information |
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Award |
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Nominee/Winner |
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| British Academy Film Awards 2005 |
The Alexander Korda Award for the Outstanding British Film of the Year |
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Nominee |
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Film certification logos reproduced by kind permission of BBFC |
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