AWAY FROM HER - watching a heart break

AWAY FROM HER is that rare thing - a love story featuring a retired couple - played by Julie Christie and Gordon Pinset. After the first flush of love and middle-aged marital infidelity they have settled into a profound emotional and physical relationship. This is snatched away from them when the wife is diagnosed with Alzheimers disease, enters a residential care facility and in forgetting her husband, falls for another man. Julie Christie gives a brave and touching performance as a women struggling to separate her current life from snatched memories that disturb her. But it is Gordon Pinset who quietly reveals a breaking heart as he watches his wife attach herself to another.

AWAY FROM HER is a beautifully written and acted film, based on a short story by Alice Munro and directed by debutante Canadian, Sarah Polley. I loved the graceful moving camera that slowly weaves its way through a cafe of sufferers and families, or moves through a house. It is a patient interrogator of emotions that are selflessly held back as the couple try to handle this tragedy with a touch of grace. However, the disadvantage of such a deliberately patient shooting style is that the film can seem a little dragging in parts. I also found the frequent inter-cutting between the past, the wife's admission to the care facility and the husband's subsequent friendship with his rival's wife (Olympia Dukakis) un-necessarily complicated. Nonetheless, AWAY FROM HER is an important film, and an acting master-class.

AWAY FROM HER played Toronto 2006 and Sundance, Berlin and Dublin 2007. It opens in the UK this Friday, in France on May 2nd, in Norway and the US on May 4th, in the Netherlands on October 4th and in Spain in November.

3 NEEDLES - don't be put off by the gruesome title

Without a doubt, if this movie had the backing of a major studio, it would be up for Oscars. But what am I saying? No major studio would back a movie that reads like such a “downer”. 3 NEEDLES tells three separate stories of people suffering from AIDS – a porn star in Canada, plantation workers in South Africa and villagers in China. There is lots of gruesome stuff – young African boys undergoing ritual adult circumcision for starters – but this is not a pretentious didactic grim mess. There are a lot of movies out there that you admire more than enjoy. But here you can do both. Many of the scenes are very very funny and the film wears its social message lightly.

3 NEEDLES is directed by a young American director - Thom Fitzgerald. Despite his relatively unproven track record, he has been able to attract a brilliant cast, including Chloe Sevigny, Sandra Oh, Olympia Dukakis, Stockard Channing and Lucy Liu.

In the Canadian strand, Stockard Channing ("Anything Else", "Practical Magic") plays the working class mother of a young porn star who has AIDS but is fiddling his blood tests so he can keep acting. He knows he is infecting his co-workers but needs the money. In the South African strand, Chloe Sevigny ("The Brown Bunny", "Melinda and Melinda") plays a novice who becomes a missionary to South Africa, working in a health clinic attached to a plantation where AIDS is pandemic, the plantation owner is reluctant to fund healthcare and the victims believe that they can cure the virus by sleeping with a virgin.

In the Chinese strand, Lucy Liu ("Charlie's Angels", "Kill Bill") plays a woman who is running an illegal blood supply business. Driving round villages in a white van she offers peasants five dollars for their blood, which is then sold on to hospitals. Her equipment is contaminated and infects whole villages. This strand is actually surprisingly funny and touching in how it depicts the relationship between a father and his young daughter who is a blood donor. The comic timing is all the more amazing given that this is a cast of largely untrained actors. Lucy Liu also gives an outstanding performance of real pathos. Who knew she could actually act?

This film was originally shown at the Toronto film festival in September 2005 and ran at 123 minutes. The version shown at the London film festival 2005 – the European premiere - was 15 minutes shorter for which we can “thank” the Canadian distributor. However, the Director intimated that a European release would have the extra footage restored. 3 Needles will get a limited US release in December 2006.