Day seven of the London Film Festival diary and it's all about causing a stir: from the Allen Ginsberg biopic HOWL, to a critical history of Israel in Miral to Slumdog's stunning star Freida Pinto turning heads on the red carpet. No stranger to controversy himself, Chris Sullivan checks it all out…
Yesterday I finished my day by watching a film about one of America’s great stately homo, the beat poet William Burroughs and today I started by viewing HOWL, a picture about a work by another gay beat poet, Allen Ginsberg.
HOWL examines the creative process behind the eminent poet’s greatest and most controversial work, looking at the events leading to its invention, the exhaustive writing method and the almost unfathomable furore, scathing reviews and subsequent obscenity trial that followed its publication.
The poem sold by the truckload, giving Ginsberg (brilliantly rendered by James Franco) instant notoriety that he continued to milk as he rattled round the clubs of Manhattan until his death in 1997.
'I applaud Julien Schnabel for having the guts to stand up and be counted'
An amazingly innovative film that employs animation, archive and reconstruction to paint its portrait of Ginsberg and his ‘angel-headed hipsters,’ I enjoyed it.
Tonight’s big gala was Miral – painter and director Julien Schnabel’s adaptation of Rula Jebreal’s autobiographical tome. The film looks at the life of a young Palestinian girl growing up in East Jerusalem as she confronts the effects of occupation and war.
Of course what is amazing is that the director – whose mother was the president of Hadassah the Women's Zionist Organization of America – has made a film that comprises an episodic examination of Israeli political history between 1947 and 1994 and lambasts the state’s systematic maltreatment of the Palestinians at every turn.
I applaud Schnabel for having the guts to stand up and be counted. And while half of London’s film community was debating the film’s politics, the other half was eyeing up the film’s beautiful star Freida Pinto, who celebrated her birthday by strolling down the red carpet in a black Alexander McQueen dress while her boyfriend Dev Patel was away filming in India.
“I’m here till tomorrow,” she said on the red carpet. “So there’s no way I can celebrate my birthday in India and that’s where Dev is filming. But my family are here so I’m just going to celebrate with them a bit later.” As for me I almost joined her at the after party but was just too tired.
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Actresses Yasmine Elmasri and Freida Pinto, director Julian Schnabel and writer Rula Jebreal © Getty Images
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