Bradford festival celebrates anniversary with impressive line-up

The 67-year-old has enjoyed an enviable career in big-budget Hollywood blockbusters as well as more modest indie offerings. Thus The Bourne Supremacy will be screened alongside Believe, the story of the ageing football guru Matt Busby. Cox features in both. Other guests include pundit-turned-director Mark Cousins, John Shuttleworth aka comedian Graham Fellows, American indie legend James Benning (a BIFF favourite of long-standing) and writer/director Sally (Orlando) Potter, who receives a complete retrospective.

Festival director Tom Vincent describes the line-up as “awash with riches”, and he’s right. The event boasts more than 120 titles and 40-plus premieres at venues in Bradford, Leeds and Hebden Bridge.

New titles include opener The Lunchbox, a delicious light romance from India, Locke, starring Tom Hardy in an acclaimed turn as a man in a car coping with ever-expanding crises via his mobile phone, and Tracks, with Mia Wasikowska trekking alone across the Australian desert. There are new films starring Tom Hiddleston, Ben Whishaw, Daniel Auteuil and Kristin Scott Thomas, a revisit to the crime films of Japanese master Yoshitaro Nomura – including a screening of The Demon aka Kichiku, starring Ken Ogata – and A Story of Children and Film from Mark Cousins.

Two decades of BIFF means a look back to some of its past hits. Audiences are being asked to choose their festival fave. Titles include In Bruges, Amazing Grace and Trainspotting. The one with the most votes will be screened anew.

Music will be provided by The Dodge Brothers, the Mark Kermode-fronted band, which is returning to Bradford for the third time. Pianist extraordinaire Neil Brand will accompany Kermode and Co for a screening of the 1916 silent classic Hell’s Hinges.

Horror junkies can get their teeth into a fourth helping of Bradford After Dark which this year presents more strange, extreme and fantastic cinema. Titles include Escape from Tomorrow, in which a wholesome family finds its holiday taking a nightmarish turn, and Bad Milo, about a man with a demon in his innards.

There is a four-day gap between the end of BIFF and the start of the Widescreen Weekend, a four-day celebration of widescreen cinema. Titles in Imax, Cinerama, 70mm and VistaVision include The Big Blue, White Christmas, Seven Wonders of the World and Big Trouble in Little China.

Bradford International Film Festival Remembering Widescreen, a new documentary by Wolfram Hannemann, also gets a premiere. Shot at last year’s festival it focuses on the aficionados and obsessives who keep the flame burning bright. And film buff, academic and historian Professor Sir Christopher Frayling will give an illustrated lecture on Italian western giant Sergio Leone followed by a screening of For a Few Dollars More.

The programme is still being added to, so watch for updates on the festival website.

• BIFF, March 27-April 6; Widescreen Weekend April 10-13. www.nationalmediamuseum.org.uk