10 to see at Borderlines Film Festival 2020

Now in its 18th annual edition, the Borderlines Film Festival kicks open its doors on 28 February in a mood of resilience following the storms and floods that have plagued the region of late. The festival covers Herefordshire, Shropshire, Malvern and the Welsh Marches, always bringing an intriguing mix of previews and archive classics to cinemas and special venues across the area. Opening night this year is Roger Michell’s ensemble piece Blackbird, featuring Kate Winslet, Sam Neill, Susan Sarandon and Mia Wasikowska. After that, though, there are still 15 days of screenings to navigate. Here are some signposts…

This year’s festival is continuing its F-rating – a badge dished out to films in the programme either written or directed by women, with many of this year’s selections among those snubbed by major awards ceremonies. Toppermost is Joanna Hogg’s tactile memoir of her life as an arts student in 1980s London. The Souvenir was named best film of 2019 by Sight & Sound magazine, yet was mysteriously absent from the BAFTA nominations.

Having turned 100 this week, there’s never been a better time to catch up with The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari. Borderlines has you covered with a screening of this landmark of German Expressionist cinema, complete with live piano accompaniment. With its stylised sets and ambiguous structure, Robert Wiene’s film has had an incalculable influence on horror cinema and film noir.

Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger’s sublime tale of sexually frustrated nuns living in a convent high in the Himalayas is one of Britain’s great films – intoxicating in its use of colour to create a spellbinding atmosphere. That atmosphere will surely only benefit from the hallowed setting of Hereford’s All Saints church, where Borderlines is hosting a special screening.

The career of Czech master Milos Forman is being celebrated with a handful of screenings this year. Most famous are his Oscar-laden Hollywood releases One Flew over the Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) and Amadeus (1984), but the festival is also serving up a brace of his early Czech work, including this beautifully shot tale of frustrated romance – one of the highlights of the 1960s Czech New Wave.

Getting a preview ahead of its UK release in the spring, It Must Be Heaven sees the return of Palestian auteur Elia Suleiman with another of his highly distinctive, virtually wordless comedies. Suleiman himself is the deadpan centre of a series of scenes that play as ingenious visual gags, as his character jets between Paris, New York and Palestine. He’s like a Palestinian Jacques Tati or Buster Keaton, and the results are delicious. Watch for a cameo from Gael García Bernal.

Borderlines brings together a trio of recent releases with a nautical bent. Robert Eggers’ maritime horror The Lighthouse and Mark Jenkin’s Cornish gentrification drama Bait are both essential viewing, though if you want to feel the elemental force of the sea, your best best is Victor Kossakovsky’s Aquarela, a globe-trotting experimental documentary that captures a succession of thunderous watery environments at 96 frames per second.

From Thunder Road (2018) to Blinded by the Light (2019), there’s a trend at the moment for films informed by the songs of Bruce Springsteen. The latest is Run, a joyriding drama from director Scott Graham (Shell, Iona) that transplants the Boss’s theme of striving working-class romantics from industrial America to the coastal Scottish factory town of Fraserburgh.

A British horror debut that’s on a steady buzz after being picked up for release by A24, the American stable of distinctive genre fare like The Lighthouse and Midsommar, Saint Maud is writer-director Rose Glass’s inventive psycho-drama about a fervently religious young nurse (an astonishing turn from Morfydd Clark) who is tasked with the care of a terminally ill former dancer (Jennifer Ehle).

Among the most acclaimed films of 2019, Céline Sciamma’s 18th-century romance, Portrait of a Lady on Fire, tells the tale of the relationship between a young woman on the cusp of an arranged marriage and the artist who is assigned to secretly paint her picture. Borderlines is putting Sciamma’s exquisite drama in context, with screenings of the director’s previous releases, Tomboy (2011) and Girlhood (2014), as well the animation My Life as a Courgette (2016), which she wrote.

Fellini comes to Worcestershire in his centenary year: the Malvern Theatres are screening one of his best-loved films. With its intoxicating panorama of the good life in Rome, La dolce vita all but announced the beginning of the swinging 1960s. Marcello Mastroianni is the philandering reporter in whose company we tour the decadence of celebrity life. Fellini was working on a huge new scale here, his sights set on nothing less than a Divine Comedy for the new age.