Award for Sir Tom Courtenay as Bradford Film Festival programme is unveiled (From Bradford Telegraph and Argus)

Movie classics on show include Tom Courtenay masterpieces

7:00am Friday 8th March 2013 in News By Jim Greenhalf, T&A Reporter

Two hundred and thirty films from across the world will be screened during this year’s 19th Bradford International Film Festival – and a Lifetime Achievement Award will be given to Sir Tom Courtenay.

The news was announced yesterday at the National Media Museum in a side room adjacent to the 100 Years of Bollywood poster exhibition which opened today.

Festival co-director Neil Young said: “Tom has requested that one of his favourite films will be shown at the festival – One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.”

The 1970 film, based on the novella by the late Russian writer Alexander Solzhenitsyn, is about life inside a hard labour camp in the former Soviet Union’s prison camp system – the Gulag Archipelago.

The film will be shown at the NMM on April 13, the day that Sir Tom receives his award. The following day the restored version of the 1963 feature film Billy Liar will be shown.

John Schlesinger’s film adaptation of the novel and play of the same name, by the late Willis Hall and Keith Waterhouse, was shot on location in and around Bradford 50 years ago and remains a favourite with festival film-goers. In the run-up to the festival, which takes place from April 11-21, a number of city centre movie events are planned, said Tom Vincent, the festival’s co-director.

“This year I am delighted to announce that the festival will include a series of family matinees in the City Park that go beyond the walls of the eight venues,” he added.

These include Bradford Cathedral on April 19 when 90 minutes of short films from the Yorkshire Film Archive will be shown – footage of locally-made Jowett cars, visits by Prime Ministers Harold Wilson and Margaret Thatcher and the Queen’s visit in 1974. Yorkshire Film Archive manager Graham Relton said: “It’s our 25th anniversary this year. It’s great to be part of the festival. We have had bits in past film festivals, but not programmes such as these.”

Other festival highlights include Happy Birthday, Indian Cinema, with the screening of 12 classic and contemporary Indian movies, and three live music and comedy events at the NMM, including BBC film critic Mark Kermode and his band The Dodge Brothers, and Neil Brand. The popular Widescreen Weekend is not included this year. It is scheduled after the festival from April 26-28. Films featured include The Longest Day, The Great Escape, The Sound of Music, The Guns of Navarone and Ronald Maxwell’s 1993 American Civil War film Gettysburg.

Head of the NMM Jo Quinton Tulloch says in the festival programme: “We must take every opportunity to highlight the irreplaceable value that film and culture offer, the boundaries that they cross and the creativity that they inspire.”