Diverse films make festival a hit

The 2019 BREC International Film Festival is in full swing with 12 movies from nine different nationalities being screened until February 9.

BREC executive director Fiona de Garis said it had been a successful year, with ticket sales up 20 per cent compared to 2018.

“C’est La Vie!, Shoplifters, Wajib and the Wedding Invitation are the standouts, closely followed by Cold War and The Insult,” she said.

“I’m really looking forward to the Guilty, I think that it’s quite unusual in that it’s all one person on the screen and different telephone conversations.

“He’s a dispatcher in an emergency call centre and you get his story as well as the unfolding emergencies.”

To try to fit as many movies in as possible, Fiona and her team chose to host only two screenings of the Italian crime thriller Dogman, on account of its increasingly dark plot line.

“Dogman starts out quite gently as a black comedy but becomes fairly violent and a bit more challenging so we decided on two screenings,” she said.

“The other thing we really wanted to do — which we achieved — was make sure we had a really big international range and not just a selection of Eastern European countries.”

The 2019 International Film Festival will close on February 9 with an 8pm screening of the French comedy C’est La Vie!