Love Film Festival

An engagingly freewheeling love-story, spanning continents and years, Love Film Festival plays perfectly into the programming hands of film festivals around the world. A love tortuous love affair set against the back drop a series of film festivals, the film is directed in sections by different directors, but united by the lead performances by Leandra Leal and Manolo Cardona as film-makers who struggle to keep up their affair as films and other partners come into the equation.

It is a film that engages in parts, stutters in others, but rather bravely aims to be a fully-fledged and rather old-fashioned romantic drama.

The film, which premiered at the Rio Film Festival, may paint a slightly rosy picture of the world of short film festivals – all love, lust, romance, booze and walking in slow motion through beautiful night-time streets apparently – but the balance between ego, art, love and romance does ring true, plus the delightful Leandra Leal (so good in Wolf At The Door) brings some real class to the proceedings.

Filmed in four countries – Portugal, Brazil, Colombia and the United States –, this movie is a documentary about fictional characters. It tells the story of Lucy and Adrian, respectively a Brazilian scriptwriter and a Colombian actor/filmmaker, who fall in love at a film festival in 2009. They have a love affair over six years, always meeting at film festivals around the world.

Their on-off relationship begins (directed by Vinicius Coimbra) in 2009 in Porto, Portugal, for the 13^th annual Portuguese-Brazilian short film festival where they spot each other having a lonely solo dinner. Soon they are spending time together, talking films – he loves Park Chan-wook – and taking selfies (old-fashioned style with a real camera) and gradually falling in lustful and romantic love.

The film then switches to 2010 (with this section directed by Bruno Safadi) and the 20^th Rio de Janeiro Short Film Festival. Things are now tense between the couple – she had spent time with him in Bogota, but he was busy making his film (and tending the needs of his lead actress) to pay her appropriate attention. Both have other partners, but cannot stop themselves continuing their passionate affair, though things to an abrupt halt when her cinematographer boyfriend returns home unexpectedly.

Next up is Cartagena (the section directed by Juancho Cardona) where Lucy’s short film Transatlantico is showing in the short film festival. She can’t attend as she is scripting a soap opera back in Brazil, but in her place is actress Camila Cotote (Nanda Costa), who plays ‘Lucia’ in the film. When he sees the film an angry Adrian realises the film is the story of their affair – and it paints him in a less than perfect light – and calls her to remonstrate. But romance takes a different spin with Camila taking a shine to Adrian, who wins a best actor award at the festival.

The final segment (directed by Manuela Dias) is set two years later in Chicago where happy couple Camila and Adrian are walking out of a cinema at year another film festival. They spot Lucy who is just heading into the cinema and the one-time couple have the briefest of conversations.

It is a film that engages in parts, stutters in others, but rather bravely aims to be a fully-fledged and rather old-fashioned romantic drama. The film festival backdrop will be rather familiar to regualar festival goers (as will be a scene where they pinch food from the hotel breakfast for an impromptu picnic later on) and will make the film all the more appealing to other festivals. The first half works perhaps a little better (but then new love is always more exciting to film) and it is here that the excellent Leandra Leal takes on a bigger role in the film. Her shoes are filled to good effect by the beautiful and talented Nanda Costa in the last third, but it is also a welcome to see Leal’s sad face for the final scenes.