BBC Learning English Entertainment London Film Festival

BBC Learning English

Entertainment London Film Festival

Yvonne: This year welcomes The Times newspapers’ 50th BFI London Film Festival! This British Film Institute festival is a truly international affair that focuses on great films rather than marketing big Hollywood movies. Hello, I’m Yvonne Archer and you're listening to Entertainment from bbclearningenglish.com!

Sandra Hebron is the artistic director of the London Film Festival and in an interview for the BBC World Service, she talks about the international nature of the festival – particularly this year, its 50th. Listen out for the countries Sandra mentions…

INSERT - SANDRA HEBRON One of the best things the festival can do is to say that there is originality and creativity to be found literally around the globe. I think one of the things that I would say about this year is that we are still seeing really amazing work being produced from Latin America. I think Argentina continues to be really strong, you know, we have the new film by Pablo Trapero, we have Adrian Caetano's new film - something like 7 or 8 really strong new films from Argentina. Mexico too is emerging too as very much one of the leading Latin American cinemas. I think that East Asia continues to be very strong. We're very happy obviously to have “Still Life” - Jia Zhangke's Venice winning film. But there are films from Japan, Korea - actually, two or three films from the Philippines this year too, which is really a sort of new thing that we're seeing. So a very kind of, a very diverse spread of work from really a huge range of countries.

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Yvonne: Wow, that’s a pretty impressive list of countries - and many of them have more than one film to be shown during the London Film Festival. But how many of those countries did you manage to catch? Sandra Hebron mentioned Argentina and Mexico as Latin American countries and there was Japan, Korea and the Philippines from Asia. But did you notice any of the adjectives that Sandra used to describe those films – which she obviously thinks are worth seeing? They’re adjectives that you might come across in film reviews. See how many of them you can catch as we hear from Sandra again…

Yvonne: How did you get on? We heard ‘originality’, ‘creativity’, ‘amazing’ and we heard ‘really strong’ more than once. There was also ‘leading’ – as Sandra described Mexico as ‘one of the leading Latin American cinemas’ – so Mexico is producing some of the best films from the Latin American area. And you may have noticed Sandra’s last comment that there’s ‘a very diverse spread of work’ – meaning that there’s a very large variety of films to be shown during The Times 50th BFI London Film Festival!

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INSERT - SANDRA HEBRON A very diverse spread of work from really a huge range of countries.

Yvonne: As there are so many great films to see during the Film Festival, it’s almost impossible to see them all. So how do we decide which films are worth seeing? BBC Learning English’s Alice Castle has attended the Berlin Film Festival, the Karlovy Vary Film Festival in Prague and of course, the London Film Festival. And Alice has also written several film reviews. Here she is with some tips on how to choose our films:

INSERT - ALICE CASTLE If you're going to a big film festival and you're trying to decide which films you want to see, read the little what they call a 'blurb' which is the little bit of information that's written underneath the film title and you'll usually find that they'll tell you what the story is, who the director is, who the actors are – and that usually gives you a pretty good idea if you're going to like the film.

Yvonne: Alice has her favourite countries and directors and that helps her to choose which films to watch. But if we’re new to film festivals, all we need to do is simply read the ‘blurb – that's the information we're given about each film including its story - and that’s a good way to find a film that will interest us!

The main aim of the London Film Festival is simply to show good films! Perhaps you’ve seen some films from your own country which you think are original and creative enough to take part in an international film festival. Why not talk about that in English after today's Entertainment?!