Kenny Glanaan & other Brit directors

Totally agree with you there Tim - Yasmin is moving, powerful and impeccably made. Funnily enough I had the chance to meet up with Kenny Glanaan, the film's director, at last year's Cornwall Film Festival, where Yasmin was shown. He was a warm and tremendously engaging young director, full of passion for his medium and totally committed to experimenting with film. His way of working is very loose, unstructured and free-flowing - like many of Britain's best directors, he's entirely happy to go into rehearsals with only the barest bones of an idea and let the story take its course. Mike Leigh was one of the other keynote speakers at last year's Cornwall Film Fest - and to hear his stories of what it takes to get a film made is enough to make a grown man weep.

Apparently his ideal project would be to go into an inner-city housing estate and just shoot what happens...tough to get the funders excited on that one, maybe, but still tremendously refreshing to hear. There's an undercurrent of exciting directors and writers in Britain right now - but how is it they never seem to get the credit or the support they deserve? How can a filmmaker as brilliant as Shane Meadows still be struggling to get his stuff made? Why don't the British public go an see his films? They're funny, smart, moving, and brilliantly directed - Dead Man's Shoes has more ideas and a higher standard of performance than ANYTHING that came out of Hollywood in the last 12 months - and yet hardly anyone went out to see it. In France or Germany, he'd be hailed as a genius. In Britain, somehow, people are still saying "Shane who?"