Random collisions at the LFF

People – disparate, distracted, in London, watching, engaged, rapt (even if what they're looking at has something of the overstatement of a Second Coming) – the new trailer for the London Film Festival touts the PR message that it's the public not the industry that figures in this event. Certainly the audiences have turned out in force; many, if not most of the screenings this week, daytime and evening, have been fully booked. There's congestion on the escalators in the multiscreen Vue even if the viewing spaces in the festival's new West End venue are smaller than in previous years.

And on Thursday evening the LFF hosts London Moves Me, a free outdoor screening of, capital-related transport films from the BFI National and London Screen Archives in Trafalgar Square.

For me, two and a half days into viewing the experience has been one of coincidences, filmic rather than social encounters, though I did glimpse the back of Colin Firth's head while queuing to collect tickets. It started with a couple of previews a few weeks ago. First Harmony Korine's Trash Humpers in which a gang of ostensibly elderly delinquents.... yes, hump trash and engage in various other trashing scenarios, repetitively, on low-grade video footage. Shortly after I saw Burrowing, a beautifully crafted Swedish film in which four characters living in the same suburban community (different ages and degrees of affluence) follow trajectories that set them outside society. Anti-social tendencies

Yesterday I viewed four movies: The Road, Ivul, Today's Special, and Dogtooth. And the following themes recurred in two or more of them: dystopias, imploding families with a highlight on father/son relationships, incest, survivalism, too little or too much food, falling tree imagery and crows.

The Road, based on the Cormac McCarthy novel, is truly terrifying, the logical and unpalatable outcome of the message of The Age of Stupid, far more powerful in terms of film-making. A father and son battle their way through an unrelenting and monotone landscape at the world's end.

The best film I've seen so far has been Dogtooth, a film from Greece, a remarkable achievement. It's a parable about family life and the future of the family that manages to be bright, funny and natural on the one hand and darkly satirical on the other. Using a combination of fences and Pavlovian training, the mother and father of an anonymous family isolate their grown-up children from the world in what is effectively an affluent prison. Wielding short, sharp shocks, the film comes across as fresh, provocative and surreal. It's quite rare - and very encouraging - to come across a film that is not just underivative but genuinely original.

Winterbottom's The Shock Doctrine: Slashing Through Cut Throat Capitalism

More from Borderlines Director, David Gillam, at the San Sebastian Film Festival:

Michael Winterbottom's new documentary The Shock Doctrine does exactly what it says on the tin - galloping through Naomi Klein's influential book in 75 minutes is quite a feat.

Klein's basic idea that crises provide the opportunity to introduce economic policies that would otherwise be unpopular is well documented through the usual suspects: Milton Friedman, Pinochet's Chile, Thatcher, Reagan, Yeltsin's Russia through to cut throat capitalism's current crisis.

An important film if you want to know why the world is in such a mess...

Enigmatic new Jarmusch film - Spanish road movie or mind trip?

Fresh bulletin from David Gillam in San Sebastian:

Jim Jarmusch's The Limits of Control provided a note of entertainment to a diet of murder and madness. A black samurai crosses Spain meeting a stellar cast of mysterious strangers for bizarre, cryptic conversations about cinema, art, perception. John Hurt, Tilda Swinton in a ridiculous white wig, Gael García Bernal parade by till a final showdown with Bill Murray, one of the men in black running a secret prison in Spain.

Playful, funny, certainly the most acute, cinematic reponse to the state of the world.