Well, we're into it now. I've seen fourteen films over the last three days and there's still another week of the festival left. I'm going to do my best to review everything I see and get it on here but there may be a bit of a delay as I realise now that the timetable I've set myself doesn't allow time for eating, let alone writing.

I think the best way to go about this is to do a separate post for each day. It's worth nothing that over the first weekend of the fest is dominated by the Horror Weekend, basically fourteen horror films pretty much back to back. This means that the first few posts will be longer than the rest.

For each film you see you get a response card which you are asked to use to give the film a star rating out of five. I've included my ratings of these films with the reviews. have to admit that I can't remember ever giving anything a 1*, and 2* are pretty rare too so high is the calibre of the films selected for this festival.

Anyway, the fest started on Thursday 02/11/06 but the first film I caught was on Friday:

Little Birds (Japan, 2004) 4*

Subtitled, "How Many Children Have You Killed In Iraq?" this powerful Japanese doc manages to give a fresh angle on a conflict that long ago reached media saturation.

Starting in the days leading up the start of the war we see Iraq as a relatively normal country, with people going about their lives.

Of course we know there're shitty things going on, it's a dictatorship with people disappearing and being tortured etc, but these things are happening within a functioning infrastructure.

An interesting detail is that several of the ordinary people the crew interview on the not-for-long peaceful streets of Baghdad express their disappoint in Japan for joining the 'coalition of the willing'.

Many of these Iraqis actually see Japan as a vague kind of ally through their shared status of victims of US military aggression.

This being the case they can't understand how or why Japan would join forces with the people who dropped atomic bombs on them.

The war starts and we see the 'Shock & Awe' bombing raids, (which I believe you'll find in the dictionary as the very definition of the word terrorism,) from a distance, before seeing the aftermath up close.

Blood on concrete and tattered remains of shoes, this is not for the squeamish. The shops we saw thriving and then being carefully locked up just minutes earlier are now smoking shells.

Move to the hospitals where doctors drag the camera crew through crowds to see the carnage up close. Why? They want the world to see what is happening.

With a sickening feeling of dread I realised something here. These doctors, and many others, are labouring under a perfectly justified but tragically flawed assumption.

They assume that these horrific, inhuman acts can only occur because the aggressors, (us, the West) don't understand the consequences. How can anyone KNOWINGLY carry out such acts? they seem to think.

What turns my stomach and chills my spine is that we know exactly what we're doing, we just don't care. How then can anything change?

In the hospitals we meet see people hysterical with grief, pawing desperately at tiny stiffening bodies. The emotional pain on display here is simply overwhelming.

In a way however, we are used to this. Just as when we see the angry mobs and protests in the streets, it's all very familiar because this is the exciting TV footage we've been getting on the news for over three years.

This is the consumable energy, the eye catching, voyeur sating action we're spoon fed on a daily basis. Ooh, those crazy Arabs eh?

What we get here that we don't on the news, and what gives this film it's aforementioned fresh angle, are the quiet, 'boring', shots.

The people in the hospitals and on the streets who are now screaming and howling, but simply staring, utterly hopeless and vacant.

The guy in the hospital bed, smacked off his tits on morphine, begging to be killed because he has lost a leg. The guy who, later on has managed to rebuild his home but doesn't want to live there any more because it's where three of his four tiny children were killed.

We've been overloaded with the physical tragedy, the material cost of our actions, but Little Birds sticks our faces right into the heart of the hitherto ignored emotional and psychological damage we're inflicting on these people.

In the hospitals we meet people we'll then follow, in particular the guy who lost three of his kids. When we meet him he's stood with his five year old daughter, trying to get her to keep the oxygen mask on.

She's not struggling hard, her movements have a weird slowness, a kind of drowsy clumsiness about them. He tells us this is because, under the mass of bandages, her brain is hanging out of the back of her head.

He tells us how he tried to push it back in and you can see this guy can't actually believe what's happening in front of him.

I'm getting choked up just writing about it.

After the initial chaos and impact, the film slows and begins to drag, There is no direction anymore, just tragedy upon tragedy, hideousness upon hideousness, no progress, no development.

This is not a criticism.

In fact what would be dreadful film making in most other circumstances serves perfectly here to communicate the nature of this conflict. A descent into meaningless, and seemingly endless suffering.

We see the guy and his wife with their single remaining daughter, his desperation that she never forget her siblings and her complete lack of comprehension of the wider situation.

At one point, and my eyes are actually wet now, he takes us to the area where, on the day his kids died, US tanks blocked the street and stopped the ambulance getting to the hospital.

He recalls how he carried both his tiny daughters, or what was left of them, in his arms and managed to get them to the ambulance which was already carrying a man who had lost his leg.

I don't know how but, for the most part, this guy manages to be calm and articulate, he wants people to know, to see. Standing on that street though we watch as he slowly loses it, torturing himself with if-onlys, if only he'd got them to a doctor, to a hospital sooner, maybe he could have saved them.

For most of the films I've seen so far I've made about a page of notes. I have in front of me over five sides of notes about this film and I could write much more, though not without weeping I suspect.

In the interests of making this readable however, I'll just mention a couple more points.

Kids with cancer.

Somehow it had never occurred to me that there would be people in Iraq who were already fucked, people who relied on the infrastructure for their very lives.

The outright demolition of Iraq left these people in the hands of desperately stretched charities and a handful of dedicated Iraqi medical professionals.

Imagine what would happen if all the sick and elderly people in our country suddenly had all their support torn away. How would they survive.

It's also worth mentioning that in his book, "The New Rulers of the World," John Pilger claims that the cancer rate in Iraq is approaching 50%! This is a result of the depleted uranium munitions we used in the southern deserts in towards the end of the nineties.

Unlike in Kuwait, we didn't spend huge sums of money to clean up the mess and so the sandstorms just moved the radioactive material about the country, mutating crops and fishing stock and giving kids cancer.

The sanctions stopped cancer drugs reaching Iraq and now we've wrecked the roads and hospitals. It would genuinely have been more humane to just walk in and shoot these little bald kids in the face.

Do you know what a cluster bomb, or bomblet looks like? Well I do now. They're scattered everywhere, in people's gardens, farms, in open areas outside towns where kids play.

As one young lad tells us, "I thought it was just a piece of metal, I didn't know what it was," and then it blew his arm off.

This film does NOT give you an understanding of how the Iraq people feel.

What this film does is make you realise that we simply cannot even begin to conceive of how the Iraqi people feel. We in the comfortable west, looking down from our moral high ground, have not the slightest conception of this scale of tragedy.

The guy who lost his kids talked about the war with Iran, then with Kuwait and now with the US as being all exactly the same to him. Just meaningless suffering, nothing is achieved he just loses more members of his family.

As the fest rep who introduced the film said, Little Birds is not an easy watch. If you want some idea of the reality of our own foreign policy however, this will it make clear in ways you will not be able to forget.

Dark Remains (USA, 2005) 3*

The horror weekend kicked off with Dark Remains, a shameless collage of a million other horror films with just enough of a vibe to give it its own identity.

After making a few notes on this film I realised I could some it up in just six words: very well made, very badly written.

A couple's young daughter is brutally murdered and they move to a remote cabin in the middle of a forest on a mountain to escape accusing eyes. As you might expect there's something evil in them there woods.

Now there's nothing wrong, in my eyes, with being unoriginal, as long as you do it well. After the first twenty minutes however, all character development ceases and the film plateaus.

In fact the plot was so flat and vague that I didn't care enough to be annoyed by the naff attempt at a dramatic conclusion and chilling end.

To be fair however, as classic and standard as the jumps and nasties are, they are of a high quality.

I was, occasionally, genuinely shocked by the in your face flashes of horror and the figures flitting past doorways in the background, faces reflected in the corner of the TV screen etc did build a nice sense of tense dread.

A horror film from the classic Hollywood mould, competently made but nothing special.

Luckily there was a whole lot more to come from the horror weekend and you wouldn't want to peak too early now would you?