LIDF

With the last of Don Boyd’s excellent and intriguing introductions to his works, giving the average viewer something else to look forward to and the Boyd fan an exciting glimpse into the background of this pioneering director, War Requiem started. This was a beautiful piece to end the Festival on. Wordless and mysterious, this film by the late Derek Jarman, produced by Boyd, combines visual storytelling and metaphorical imagery with Benjamin Britten’s famous War Requiem, commissioned for the rebuilding of Coventry Cathedral and inspired by Wilfred Owen’s war poetry that echoed the composer’s own pacifist stance. The film accompanies each movement of the Requiem with its main characters of the Nurse, Wilfred Owen, the German Soldier and the Unknown Soldier, played by Tilda Swinton, Nathaniel Parker, Sean Bean and Owen Teale, with a cameo performance and voiceover by Laurence Olivier as the Old Soldier, in different situations, playing out their wartime roles and their grief at the effects of war on their lives and the lives of those around them.

Don Boyd told us the touching story of the effect being involved had on an aging and dementia-stalked Olivier;  after he later died, his own nurse called Boyd to tell him the actor had had a new lease of life after filming the piece. Jarman himself was very ill during filming. He wrote it at his famous farmhouse, where the garden was used as the backdrop for the first scene with Olivier. And despite Boyd agreeing that the piece would never be commissioned today, he was pleased to be able to tell us that the BBC have had to re-purchase it, intending to show it again.

As an end to the Festival, this warmly-received piece reminded us of everything the huge variety of films shown have set out do: invite us to remember the forgotten, or even meet the unknown for the first time. A moving finish.