Biggest rural film festival to get under way

The UK’s biggest rural film festival will welcome thousands of movie buffs to Shropshire and neighbouring counties when it launches on Friday.

The Borderlines Film Festival involves village halls and community centres and venues will open their doors for three weeks.

Spokeswoman Alison Chapman said: “It’s not often you find a national film festival opening in a village hall.

“But from Friday that’s just what Borderlines Festival will do as it rolls out across the region’s parish halls.

“The sixth Borderlines Festival will formally open in places such as Bosbury, Bodenham, the Market Theatre in Ledbury and seven neighbouring villages.

“Later, it will visit All Stretton, Ludlow and Leintwardine.”

Festival director David Gillam said: “It’s the nation’s biggest rural film festival, so it seems appropriate to screen some of the best films like The Lives of Others, Still Life, and Atonement at rural venues.”

Ludlow’s Assembly Rooms will be the venue for several film events.

Radio 4’s Archers agricultural story editor, Graham Harvey, will introduce Our Daily Bread, a striking and sometimes shocking documentary about the industrialisation of farming, on April 9. On April 10, A Crude Awakening, on the impending end of our oil supplies, will be followed by a debate with the writer, Ian Marchant, and Rachel Francis, Felicity Norman and Sally Ford.

On April 6 Leintwardine film director Naomi Vera-Sanso will introduce two films at the Courtyard, Hereford: Wartime Sec-rets and Real Life on the Black Mountains.

The latest venue to join Borderlines is The Regal at Tenbury Wells. It will screen the Powell and Pressburger classic, Gone To Earth, based on Shropshire’s novelist Mary Webb’s novel, on April 13.