13/09/2010

The Raindance Film Festival (September 29-October10), the UK’s largest independent film festival, turns 18 this year and typically, festival director Elliot Grove unveiled a programme that is by turns worthy and controversial.

The opening and closing night films are safe enough with Edward and Rory McHenry’s animated Jackboots On Whitehall [+see also:
trailer
film profile], featuring a stellar voice cast including Ewan McGregor, Rosamund Pike and Richard E Grant, opening and Mohamed Al Daradji’s Iraqi film Son of Babylon closing.

The controversy comes from Europe, with the festival choosing debutant Serbian director Srdjan Spasojevic’s A Serbian Film, which has been widely criticised for scenes involving paedophilia, necrophilia, rape and incest. The British Board of Film Classification has banned any uncut public screening of the film and Raindance is getting around it by screening the film as a “private event”.

Also in the line-up is Bruce La Bruce’s ‘gay zombie porno’ LA Zombie [+see also:
trailer
film profile], already banned in Australia, and Dirty Diaries, a collection of thirteen pornographic short films by Swedish feminists produced by Mia Engberg.

Grove said, “It’s important to understand that these films weren’t programmed because people have dubbed them as controversial. In many cases we’ve been following these films throughout the year, and before anybody even mentioned them as causing any supposed offence. We feel audiences have the right to pass their own judgement, and people know exactly what they are seeing.

We also need to take a stand in our programming and be independent in the sense of allowing people to judge for themselves. After all, we are over 18 years old.”