London film festival focuses on refugees

Two-week programme features award-winning films from Polanski to Frears.

The plight of refugees in Britain is one of the major themes of this year's London film festival.

The festival, which runs from November 6 - 21 before going on tour, opens with Stephen Frears's Dirty Pretty Things, a thriller set in London's refugee community starring the French actor Audrey Tautou, who will be unrecognisable to moviegoers who saw her beguiling performance as Amelie.

Joining the line-up just before today's launch is a new film by the leading British director Michael Winterbottom, entitled M1157811. The title is the number given to an Afghan refugee on his arrival in Britain. Winterbottom's film was so late an addition to the schedule that the festival's artistic director Sandra Hebron said she still did not know when it would be shown.

The festival closes with what Hebron described as "a rather different" look at British life in The Heart of Me, a 1930s society romance starring Helena Bonham-Carter. Hebron said the adaptation of Rosamond Lehmann's novel The Echoing Grove was "a precise and nuanced" film.

Other notable screenings include The Pianist, Roman Polanski's Holocaust drama, which won the Palme d'Or at this year's Cannes festival; Peter Mullan's The Magdalene Sisters, a film about sadistic Roman Catholic nuns which was garlanded at both the Venice and Toronto festivals; and Anita and Me, a Brummy coming-of-age comedy adapted from a novel by the comedian Meera Syal.

Elsewhere, the festival includes a number of documentaries, among which is Live Forever, an exploration of the Britpop and Britart phenomena of the 1990s. Hebron said the film was essential viewing, "if only for the sight of Liam Gallagher grappling with the concept of androgyny."

From outside Britain, the programme includes Eminem's surprisingly convincing feature debut in 8 Mile, about - erm - a young rapper; Marie-Jo and Her Two Loves, from Marseillaise director Robert Guediguian, famous for his understated realism in films such as A La Place Du Coeur; and two films from Argentina's new wave, Suddenly and Everything Together.

After London, the festival will visit Newcastle, Bradford, Nottingham, Bristol, Manchester, and Glasgow, before finishing on December 8 in Canterbury.