22/08/2008

The British film industry has a significant presence at the Toronto Film Festival this year with 25 films chosen in the line-up.

Some of the selected films have already garnered acclaim and awards in major festivals like Cannes and Berlin. Mike Leigh’s comedy Happy-Go-Lucky [+see also:
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film profile] won an award in Berlin for actress Sally Hawkins. Terence Davies’ love song to Liverpool Of Time and the City [+see also:
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film profile] and Duane Hopkins’ rural England-set Better Things [+see also:
film review
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film profile] were both selected for the Critics Week in Cannes, besides Steve McQueen’s award-winning Hunger [+see also:
film review
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interview: Laura Hastings-Smith Rob…
interview: Steve McQueen
film profile].

Other highlights include Jamie Jay Johnson’s ‘popumentary’ Sounds Like Teen Spirit, Saul Dibb’s The Duchess, Gabor Csupo’s The Secret of Moonacre, Michael Winterbottom’s Genova, Stephan Elliot’s Easy Virtue and Anthony Fabian’s Skin, all funded by the UK Film Council (UKFC).

The other selections are: Weijun Chen’s Biggest Chinese Restaurant in the World, Richard Parry’s Blood Trail, Toa Fraser’s Dean Spanley [+see also:
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film profile], John Latham’s Encyclopedia Britannica, Kari Skogland’s Fifty Dead Men Walking, Rosalind Nashishibi and Lucy Skaer’s Flash in the Metropolitan, Vicente Amorim’s Good [+see also:
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film profile], John Crowley’s Is There Anybody There?, Richard Linklater’s Me and Orson Welles, Richard Eyre’s The Other Man, Guy Ritchie’s RocknRolla, Danny Boyle’s Slumdog Millionaire, Charles Martin Smith’s Stone of Destiny, Paul Cronin’s A Time to Stir and Fabrice du Welz’s Vinyan [+see also:
trailer
film profile].

Lenny Crooks, head of the UKFC’s New Cinema Fund, said, “The range of British films screening at Toronto this year, from documentary to contemporary realism, fantasy, comedy and period drama, highlights the incredible breadth of filmmaking talent and being chosen for Toronto signals a significant level of international interest in new British filmmaking.”