Love Film Festival

One often hears that something is "a good festival film" (which usually means it hasn't much chance of making any money at the box office); 'Love Film Festival' is a film about film festivals, and specifically a romance played out against several of them.

Brazilian director Luzia meets Colombian actor Adrián at a festival in Oporto and the pair seem smitten with each other. But when we next meet them, one year later at another festival, they have developed "history": in the intervening period Luzia visited Adrián in Colombia but he was too caught up with his film-making - and with his clingy ex-girlfriend - to pay her much attention. From then on their relationship undergoes a full soap opera's-worth of betrayals, tantrums and forgiveness.

Someone in the film calls Luzia and Adrián "a beautiful couple", and certainly as played by Leandra Leal and Manolo Cardona they're easy on the eye. But they're not easy to like: both playing around behind their respective partners' backs and - reinforcing the soap opera theme - what Adrián later does to Luzia would cause a rare old ding-dong in the Queen Vic. It's hard to sustain interest in a film when you're not that bothered by the main characters (and, indeed, at least two people walked out of the 2015 Edinburgh International Film Festival screening I attended). The stilted dialogue doesn't help matters, although that may be down to the translation.

On the other hand, the four (count 'em!) directors deserve credit for delivering their segments in such a way that the different styles are not jarringly noticeable (an awkwardly-staged argument between Luzia and her boyfriend aside). I'd file this film under "worth seeing once".