Swindon Film Festival is bigger and better

The first event organised by the Swindon Film Society was held last year and was a modest success. This year the organisers have pulled out all the stops to make the festival more accessible, and with a greater choice of movies.

It begins with a French comedy at Swindon Dance Theatre on March 4, and ends with a multi-national thriller at Cricklade Town Hall on March 18.

In between there is drama, documentary, comedy, adventure and animation at the Arts Centre, the Central Library, North Swindon Library, The Platform, The Vic pub and Wroughton’s Ellendune Centre.

The festival will also be one of the first events to use the new Northview Centre, in Highworth. The former Northview Primary School, which controversially closed last year, will screen British films From Time To Time, a period piece starring Maggie Smith, and Mike Leigh’s latest Another Year, on March 11.

And to tie in with World Book Night on March 5, the Central Library is hosting two free screenings of successful adaptations of well-known books – The Golden Compass, based on Philip Pullman’s Northern Lights, and another Maggie Smith movie, The Prime Of Miss Jean Brodie.

The festival opens at 6pm on March 4 at the dance theatre with Jour De Fete, directed by and starring French comedy legend Jacques Tati, who plays a typically eccentric village postman.

It closes on March 18 in Cricklade with The Ghost, in which Ewan McGregor plays a ghost writer hired to work on the memoirs of a former Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan), with startling results.

Barbara Thompson, of the Swindon Film Society, said the festival had taken almost a year to plan.

She said: “Although we used several venues last year, we knew that we wanted to spread further afield. It has taken quite a bit of organising, but we’re delighted with the way it has all pulled together, with a lot of help and enthusiasm from the other groups that we are working with, like Swindon Dance, and the libraries and the Computer Museum.

“We think that Swindon Film Festival is turning into something a bit special. Some film festivals just happen in a few established centres, but our aim is to get out and about and involve the whole community, with an excellent and varied programme of films showing in places you perhaps don’t expect to see them.”

Tickets are on sale now at the Visitor Information Centre, in Regent Street, and from Swindon Tickets.

Information about all the films is on the festival website www.swindonfilmfestival.org.