Bradford Film Festival 2003

Premieres are scattered throughout the Festival fortnight. Our opening night gala, Hope Springs, allows us to welcome back an old friend, Yorkshire-born Mark Herman, the man behind Brassed Off and Little Voice, while our closing night gala, Puckoon, brings to life the anarchy and surrealism of Spike Milligan's classic novel of Ireland, Partition, passports and porter.

Opening Night Gala

UK Premiere: Hope Springs
Friday 14 March, 8.45pm, Pictureville Cinema,

In this charming romantic comedy, British artist Colin Ware (Colin Firth) discovers that his fiancée, Vera (Minnie Driver), the love of his life, is going to marry another man. Distraught and despondent, he gets on a plane for America and ends up in the tiny town of Hope in New England. At first, Colin is depressed, but he soon finds more than a shoulder to cry on when his innkeepers introduce him to Mandy (Heather Graham), a beautiful nurse. More...

Closing Night Gala

UK Premiere: Puckoon
Saturday 29 March, 8.15pm, Pictureville Cinema

Forty years since Spike Milligan's anarchic and surreal novel Puckoon took the literary world by storm, writer/director Terence Ryan has achieved the impossible by turning Milligan's "unfilmable" book into a tremendously funny movie.

It is 1924. In the tiny Irish town of Puckoon, residents wake up one morning to discover that the new border between Northern Ireland and the Irish Republic splits their quiet abode cleanly in two. Overnight house has been divided from outhouse, man from wife, pub chairs from bars, and church from cemetery. The cheap beer is on the wrong side of the pub, and a border patrol demands passports (renewable every year) from folk wanting to bury their dead in parts of the graveyard on the other side of the boundary. Something has to be done, and our hero Dan Madigan (Sean Hughes), an indolent wastrel and eejit, is just the man for the job. More...