Parky at the Pictures (London Film Festival Special, Part One)

Terence Rattigan may not be on a par with Shakespeare as a playwright, but his works have frequently enticed film-makers and Terence Davies joins the likes of Anthony Asquith, Delmer Daves and Mike Figgis in adapting The Deep Blue Sea. Set during the austerity that cast a pall over post-war London, the story centres on the all-consuming passion that prompts Rachel Weisz to abandon judge husband Simon Russell Beale for dashing ex-RAF pilot Tom Hiddleston, only for her to discover that life in shabby lodgings is not to her liking. Lust across the class divide is also the subject of Andrea Arnold's reworking of Wuthering Heights, which strays further from Emily Brontë's source novel than previous adaptations by the likes of William Wyler, Luis Buñuel and Jacques Rivette in casting black actor James Howson as the Liverpudlian urchin Heathcliff, who wins the heart of Yorkshire farmer's daughter, Cathy (Kaya Scodelario).

Another literary classic gets a makeover in Trishna, as Michael Winterbottom returns to Thomas Hardy to relocate Tess of the d'Urbervilles in Rajasthan, in order to chronicle the ill-starred romance between Freida Pinto, the daughter of an auto-rickshaw driver, and Mumbai hotel developer's son Riz Ahmed. With songs by Amit Trivedi and a score by Shigeru Umebayashi, this Bollywoodisation of a beloved Wessex tale will surely draw comparisons with Jude (1996) and The Claim (2000), while also making an intriguing contrast with the manner in which Frances Lea's Strawberry Fields references Tennessee Williams's A Streetcar Named Desire in pitching Anna Madeley, Christine Bottomley and Emun Elliott into a saga of desire, envy and liberation in rural Kent.

Another troublesome sister comes to the fore in Steve McQueen's Shame, as Irish-born Manhattanite Michael Fassbender has his ordered routine of sexual conquests and online encounters disrupted by younger singer sibling Carey Mulligan, whose cynical exposure of his addiction also reveals the flaws in her own needy personality. And there's more domestic dysfunction on display as the scene shifts to the New York commuter belt for Lynne Ramsay's adaptation of Lionel Shriver's prize-winning novel We Need to Talk About Kevin, which sees publisher Tilda Swinton forced to make the transition from model wife to photographer John C. Reilly to social outcast after teenage son Ezra Miller commits an unspeakable act at the local school. Switching the epistolary text into a radical, lyrical form of first-person cinema, Ramsay, cinematographer Seamus McGarvey and editor Joe Bini have redefined how to translate a bestseller to the screen.

Secrets and lies abound in three more British pictures by new directors. Recently married Claire Foy comes to question how much she really knows husband Benedict Cumberbatch when she moves to his childhood village and discovers the shady past he shares with brother Shaun Evans in Dictynna Hood's debut Wreckers, while the intrusion of menacing Tom Sturridge threatens to derail the chances of single mother girlfriend Romola Garai to put her life back on the straight and narrow with ex-soldier Eddie Marsan and homeless black teenager Candese Reid in BAFTA-winning shorts director Tinge Krishnan's feature bow, Junkhearts. The ensemble is larger, but the problems are just as intractable in Alexandra McGuinness's monochrome first outing Lotus Eaters, as aspiring actress Antonia Campbell-Hughes lingers on the periphery of a London smart set as manipulative Cynthia Fortune-Ryan seeks to play puppet mistress with would-be swains Johnny Flynn and Benn Northover and the latter's demanding girlfriend Amber Anderson.

Swansea teacher Minnie Driver also has theatrical ambitions, but they are for the students she teaches in a 1976 secondary school in Marc Evans's Hunky Dory. But her musical take on Shakespeare's The Tempest hardly has the backing of either the kids or her colleagues, despite the fact it has a song score packed with classics by David Bowie, ELO, Nick Drake and The Beach Boys. Heading further back from pre-punk Wales to London in 1921, Nick Murphy dabbles in the enduring British art of the old dark house story in The Awakening, which sees sceptical academic Rebecca Hall travelling to the country boarding school where master Dominic West is trying to reassure both the boys and their parents that a recent death has not unleashed a spectre in the corridors.

Peer pressure of a very different sort informs Nirpal Bhogal's debut Sket, which follows 16 year-old Aimee Kelly from the North East to London, where coming to terms with the death of her mother is not made any easier by the tensions between gang lord Ashley Walters and Emma Hartley-Miller, the leader of the fiercely loyal group of sassy girls who refuse to take any nonsense from the local lads. Finding out who to trust is also the theme of Dexter Fletcher's first assignment behind the camera, Wild Bill, as East End teenager Will Poulter and his 11 year-old brother Sammy Williams decide it's better trying to convince social services they are being well looked after by their shiftless jailbird dad Charlie Creed-Miles than go into a home after they are abandoned by their mother. Andrew Haigh explored the harsher side of city life in his first feature, Greek Pete (2009). But he's in gentler mood in the follow-up, Weekend, which accompanies introspective Tom Cullen and surprise bed guest Chris New as each comes to suspect that that casual Friday night club pick-up might just be the man of his dreams.

A couple of examples of cultural exchange link the British and American contributions to LFF 2011, as Madonna reflects upon the Windsor monarchy in W.E. and Nick Broomfield and Joan Churchill cast a quizzical eye over the state of the union in Sarah Palin - You Betcha! Although it centres on the abdication crisis that arose when Edward VIII (James D'Arcy) vowed to renounce his throne to marry American divorcée Wallis Simpson (Andrea Riseborough), La Ciccone's second feature slips between time frames to contrast the royal scandal with Manhattan career girl Abbie Cornish's realisation that she is trapped in a loveless marriage to successful psychoanalyst Richard Coyle and is prepared to accept social stigma to romance the lower ranked Oscar Isaac. The world was spared a Fascist sympathising monarch in 1936 and Broomfield and Churchill reveal just how close it came to having an Alaskan hockey mom just a heartbeat away from the presidency in 2008. Travelling to Sarah Palin's home town of Wasilla, the veteran documentarists meet with her parents and the friends and neighbours who remember her as a college sports star and beauty queen before she ran for mayor and embarked upon a political career that exposed her as a charismatic opportunist rather than a committed idealist.

Politics is also to the fore in the first of a George Clooney double bill. Recalling such socially engaged film-makers as Sidney Lumet and Alan J. Pakula, he directs himself in The Idea of March, an adaptation of Beau Willimon's play Farragut North that sees his presidential candidate being steered towards the Democratic convention by slick campaign manager and his ambitious spokesman Ryan Gosling. However, Gosling's mind isn't entirely on the job in hand, as he is being stalked by rival spin doctor Paul Giamatti and entranced by earnest intern Evan Rachel Wood. The stakes are just as high, but much lower profile in Alexander Payne's take on Kaui Hart Hemmings's acclaimed novel, The Descendants, as Clooney's Hawaiian lawyer has to take care of the daughters he barely knows (Shailene Woodley and Amara Miller) after their elusive mother Patricia Hastie is left in a coma by a boating accident. With Beau Bridges and Robert Forster in supporting roles, this is a long-overdue return to features for one of America cinema's brightest talents.

If anyone ever doubted the importance of the independent sector to American film, there is abundant proof positive at LFF 55, as some of the most significant indie directors of the past decade have new pictures on show. Richard Linklater is in mischievous mood in Bernie, as he relates the true story of Bernie Tiede, an assistant funeral director, amateur dramatics enthusiast and all-round good guy from Carthage, Texas whose motives were questioned when he began comforting the grumpiest and wealthiest widow in town. Jack Black and Shirley MacLaine co-star and Todd Solondz introduces audiences to an equally odd couple in Dark Horse, as thirtysomething toy collector Jordan Gelber finally leaves parents Christopher Walken and Mia Farrow to get on with their lives to marry romantic and literary failure Selma Blair. But things do not run smoothly for this match made in Solondz heaven.

The outsider love story is handled with much greater delicacy by Gus Van Sant in Restless, which contains echoes of Hal Ashby poignant gothic whimsy Harold and Maude (1971) in following the fortunes of recently diagnosed cancer victim Mia Wasikowska and Henry Hopper, who was orphaned by a grizzly car crash and divides his time between gatecrashing funerals and having meaningful conversations with the ghost of a Japanese kamikaze pilot. Miranda July includes an equally curious character in The Future, whose narrator is an injured cat named Paw Paw, who has been acquired by children's dance teacher July and boyfriend of five years Hamish Linklater to take their relationship to the next stage. However, encounters with sign-maker David Warshofsky and sage veteran Joe Putterlik leave them doubting their compatability.

Mumblecore remains one of the keystones of US indie cinema and no one is more prolific with Joe Swanberg, who is represented here by two of the four films he has directed in 2011 (what did Autoerotic and Art History do to offend estimable swan singing artistic director Sandra Hebron and her team?). Like July, Swanberg is in feline mood in Los Angeles for Uncle Kent, a portrait of fortysomething Kent Osborne, who lives with his cat and spends his spare time away from storyboarding a children's TV show hooking up with strangers on the webcam site Chatroulette. However, any hopes that he can recreate the online chemistry with journalist Jennifer Prediger during a real-life encounter are dashed by her constant phone calls to her boyfriend and a bizarre threesome with bi-curious Craigslist hook-up Josephine Decker. The wires get even more crossed in Silver Bullets, in which Swanberg plays a film director who gets jealous when buddy Ti West casts his girlfriend, Kate Lyn Sheil in his new werewolf movie and he gets his own back by selecting Sheil's gal pal Amy Seimetz to play the love interest in his next picture.

Although some critics have turned against mumblecore of late, its influence is readily evident in Alison Bagnall's The Dish and the Spoon, a quirky romcom that eavesdrops on the eccentric antics of runaway wronged wife Greta Gerwig and Olly Alexander, a young Londoner who fetches up on the Delaware coast after a long-distance flirtation misfires. Another Anglo-American liaison proves central to Drake Doremus's Like Crazy, as college student Felicity Jones outstays her visa to romance classmate Anton Yelchin. However, she is denied access back into the States after a trip home to see parents Alex Kingston and Oliver Muirhead and risks losing Yelchin to the eager Jennifer Lawrence, as the bureaucratic immigration system seems to take an eternity to process her appeal for re-admittance.

One man doing his bit for transatlantic relations is cinematographer Lol Crawley, who builds upon the reputation forged with Lance Hammer's Ballast (2008) with Braden King's HERE and debutant Andrew Okpeaha MacLean's On the Ice. The first charts the relationship that develops when American cartographer Ben Foster is rescued from an awkward situation in a remote hotel by ex-pat photographer Lubna Azabal and he invites her to help him create a satellite survey of her native Armenia. Set in the Alaskan Arctic town of Barrow, the second shows how a close friendship unravels after Iñupiaq teenagers Josiah Patkotak and Frank Qutuq Irelan become increasingly wary of each other after the former's father (Teddy Kyle Smith) comes to doubt their account of what happened to buddy John Miller on a hunting expedition.

Another man's growing conviction that all is not as it should be drives Jeff Nichols's Take Shelter, as Ohio sand mining boss Michael Shannon becomes so obsessed with apocalyptic premonitions that he risks losing wife Jessica Chastain and deaf daughter Tova Stewart and being ostracised by a small-town community increasingly convinced that he is suffering from the mental illness from which he has always dreaded suffering. With the Millennium coming, Los Angeles cop Woody Harrelson is also under increasing pressure to mend his ways in Oren Moverman's James Ellroy-scripted drama Rampart, as lawyers Sigourney Weaver and Robin Wright, sibling ex-wives Anne Heche and Cynthia Nixon and city investigator Ice Cube all implore him to stop dishing out his brutal brand of instant justice. The streets of New York a decade later are just as mean in Andrew Dosunmu's debut, Restless City, as Vespa-riding Senegalese CD hustler Alassane Sy finds himself working for pimp-cum-loan shark Anthony Okungbowa in order to record a demo of his own music and rescue hooker Sky Grey from her pitiless boss.

Finding a niche in a hostile environment is also the theme of Azazel Jacobs's Terri, as orphaned teenager Jacob Wysocki is bullied by his classmates and ignored by his teachers when he comes to live with his ailing uncle, Creed Bratton. However, vice-principal John C. Reilly takes a shine to the misfit teenager and teams him up with Bridger Zadina and Olivia Crocicchia, a couple of special kids who need his support as much as he needs theirs. And screenwriter Will Reiser also admirably skirts sentimentality in the semi-autobiographical saga 50/50, which sees director Jonathan Levine coax touching performances out of boisterous buddy Seth Rogen, anxious mother Anjelica Huston, wayward girlfriend Bryce Dallas Howard and inexperienced counsellor Anna Kendrick, as they try with varying degrees of success to help 27 year-old NPR staffer Joseph Gordon-Levitt cope with the news he has cancer.

Dealing with trauma unites the five films that focus primarily on female protagonists. Resisting the melodramatics to which Brian Welsh succumbed in the over-praised In Our Name, the debuting Liza Johnson examines in Return the impact of combat on Ohio reservist Linda Cardellini, who arrives back in the Rust Belt to discover that plumber husband Michael Shannon has been having an affair with car salesroom girl Bonnie Swencionis and finds herself becoming increasingly reliant on bluff Vietnam vet John Slattery to re-acclimatise to everyday life. In T. Sean Durkin's first feature Martha Marcy May Marlene, Elizabeth Olsen is similarly troubled by recurring visions of her time in a religious cult led by the charismatic, but callous leader John Hawkes after she reunites with estranged sister Sarah Paulson and husband Hugh Dancy at their idyllic lakeside home. Her inability to adapt to normality and the interflow of reveries and tormented recollections is repeated in Mark Jackson's claustrophobic drama, Without, as Joslyn Jensen travels to a wooded island near Washington to care for disabled Ron Carrier while his family are away. But neither a strict exercise regime nor cautious contact with the locals can prevent her from ruminating on her lost lesbian lover. A struggle to understand her sexual identity causes 17 year-old straight-A student Adepero Oduye trouble in Dee Rees's semi-autobiographical feature bow, Pariah, as middle-class African-American Brooklyn mother Kim Wayans, butch friend Pernell Walker and prim neighbour Aasha Davis all pressure her to conform to their way of thinking. But while Oduye carefully considers her choices, devout Texan housewife Rachael Harris plunges straight into reuniting stroke victim husband John Diehl with Matt O'Leary, the ne'er-do-well son he fathered years before through sperm donation in Robbie Pickering's Natural Selection, an audacious meld of Hawksian screwball, Coen acerbicism and classic road movie odd coupledom.

The mood bleakens as another young man seeks a father figure in first-timer Justin Kurzel's Snowtown. However, 16 year-old Lucas Pittaway comes to suspect that bigoted firebrand Daniel Henshall is harbouring sinister secrets after he moves into his rundown north Adelaide community in this grizzly recreation of John Bunting's notorious 1999 `bodies in the barrels' murders that shocked Australia. Dark impulses have always fascinated David Cronenberg and he returns to the development of psychoanalysis in the early 1900s for A Dangerous Method, Christopher Hampton's adaptation of his own stage play, The Talking Cure, which centres on the affair between Carl Jung (Michael Fassbender) and disturbed Russian patient Sabina Spielrein (Keira Knightley) that led to the Swiss doctor's growing detachment from his mentor, Sigmund Freud (Viggo Mortensen). The battle between order and desire, science and nature and rationalism and mysticism is further engaged in Simon Pummell's docudrama Shock Head Soul, which takes place in the same era and centres on the court case brought by German judge Daniel Paul Schreber (Hugo Kooschijn) to prove his sanity after publishing Memoirs of My Nervous Illness, which he had written (with a little help from the Writing Down Machine that transcribed his messages from God) while being treated by Professor Paul Fleschig (Thom Hoffman).

Schreber's problems partially stemmed from the fact that his father Moritz was a pioneer in the field of child behaviourism and another complex father-son relationship sparks the action in Paolo Sorrentino's English-language bow This Must Be the Place, as reclusive rocker Sean Penn (based on The Cure's Robert Smith) leaves the Dublin mansion he shares with wife of three decades Frances McDormand to complete his late father's quest to track down Auschwitz guard Heinz Lieven. This may not sound like the plotline of a warmly witty humanist odyssey, but that's what Sorrentino delivers and Roman Polanski similarly leavens the satirical skewering of a self-obsessed bourgeois quartet with plenty of wry humour in Carnage, an adaptation of Yasmina Reza's play The God of Carnage that sees couples Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz and Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly shatter the veneer of superficial politeness to hurl some home truths at each other after the former's son breaks the teeth of the latter's boy during a fracas at their New York school.

The acute ensemble playing is matched by the cast assembled by Fernando Meirelles for 360, screenwriter Peter Morgan's 21st-century variation on Arthur Schniztler's La Ronde that sees Rachel Weisz, Jude Law, Juliano Cazarre, Maria Flor, Anthony Hopkins, Ben Foster, Lucia Siposova, Johannes Krisch, Gabriela Marcinkova, Jamel Debbouze, Dinara Drukarova, Vladimir Vdovichenkov and Moritz Bleibtreu play musical beds in locations as varied as London, Paris, Bratislava, Vienna, Minneapolis, Phoenix, Denver and Rio de Janeiro. Such conspicuous cosmopolitanism contrasts with the stark simplicity of Werner Herzog's Into the Abyss: A Tale of Death, A Tale of Life, an exploration of extreme violence and its consequences that turns on the German auteur's conversations with Death Row inmates Michael Perry and Jason Burkett, who were convicted of a triple homicide in their home state of Texas. In addition to interviewing the families and victims of the pair (the latter of whom was spared execution after an appeal for clemency by his convicted felon father), Herzog also meets the prison chaplain and those preparing to put a man to death for his brutal crimes.

Herzog's typically trenchant film leads off a documentary strand that includes new works by three masters of the form. Observationist extraordinaire Frederick Wiseman goes to Paris for Crazy Horse to witness director Philippe Decouflé and his cast of nude female dancers fashion a new show for the celebrated cabaret on the Avenue George V. The stylised routines contrast tellingly with the rough`n'ready footage that Alex Gibney and Alison Ellwood have restored for Magic Trip, an account of the bus journey across the United States by novelist Ken Kesey and his Merry Band of Pranksters that inspired Tom Wolfe's pioneering 1968 non-fiction novel The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test. Capturing the mood of a superpower gripped by Cold War paranoia and Civil Rights tension, this is a compelling snapshot of a country still in mourning a year after the assassination of JFK.

Thanks to its eponymous African-American sixtysomething, flashes of wit abound in Jonathan Demme's I'm Carolyn Parker. But this is an otherwise earnest account of the frustrations faced over five years by one of the last residents to leave the Lower 9th neighbourhood in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina to reclaim her home in the face of bureaucratic incompetence and indifference. Heading West, Nick Brandestini also records the breakdown of traditional community in Darwin, which profiles some of the 35 folks left in the Death Valley mining town whose nearest neighbour in the inhospitable Mojave Desert is a secret weapons testing site that's valued more by the authorities than these obdurate and often outspoken souls.

It would be fascinating to listen in on a conversation between some of these Californian characters and the amateur law enforcers encountered by Michael Barnett in Superheroes, as Mr Xtreme, Master Legend, Dark Guardian, Apocalypse Meow and the members of the Black Monday Society are clearly willing to do whatever it takes to keep lowlifes off the streets at night. Marvel legend Stan Lee wonders whether these masked vigilantes are not one page short of a full comic-book, but there's a sinister cunning at work behind the entrapment tactics used by the New York trio of Lucid, Z and TSAF and the FBI's use of informers and agent provocateurs is exposed in Katie Galloway and Kelly Duane de la Vega's Better This World, which reveals how undercover militant activist Brandon Darby duped Texans David McKay and Bradley Crowther into participating in a plot to Molotov cocktail the 2008 Republican National Convention in St Paul, Minnesota as part of a campaign against the continuing US presence in Iraq.

Darby once enjoyed iconic status in the protesting counterculture and, in his teens, Josh 'Skreech' Sandoval was similarly lauded by the skateboarding fraternity. However, as Tristan Patterson shows in Dragonslayer, the twentysomething is now a faded idol who spends his days cadging favours off friends and fans and debating whether his first duty is to long-suffering girlfriend Leslie or Sid Rocket, the baby son he fathered with another woman. Perhaps Skreech would benefit from an acolyte like Sean 'Pellet' Pelletier, who was such a fan of 1970s Doom Metal combo Pentagram that he became frontman Bobby Liebling's manager and vowed to haul him out of the downward spiral of wild living and injudicious loving and get him back together with his bandmates. But, as Don Argott and Demian Fenton explain in Last Days Here, keeping the skeletal 54 year-old addict on the straight and narrow proves trickier than Pellet had envisaged.

No one would place Harry Belafonte in the same bracket, but Susanne Rostock reveals in Sing Your Song how the clean-cut African-American entertainer was inspired by the example of Paul Robeson and his experiences living in Jamaica to bounce back from being blacklisted in the McCarthy era to put his celebrity at the service of the Civil Rights and anti-apartheid movements, as well as the global struggle for social justice. As Tim Pearce, Sophie Lascelles and Marc Tiley demonstrate in AnDa Union: From the Steppes to the City, the members of a unique band of Inner Mongolian musicians are equally determined to use their talents to challenge oppressive polices, with their mastery of both hoomai guttural throat singing and the urtinduu long-song helping to preserve the ancient culture of the tribes once united by Genghis Khan and which is now under threat from Beijing dictat in both the capital Hohhot and in the countryside on the very edge of China.

The surnameless Lawrence is a very different kind of singer and, as Paul Kelly lays out in Lawrence of Belgravia, his career with cult outfits Felt, Denim and Go Kart Mozart never quite hit the heights as much because of the chips on his own shoulders as such twists of fate as the NME bumping Felt off the cover to promote an article on youth suicide and the Denim single `Summer Smash' being scratched from radio playlists by the car crash death of Princess Diana. The music scene also impinges upon Carol Morley's Dreams of a Life, which meets the people who knew Joyce Carol Vincent to discover how her dead body could have lain undiscovered for three years in a flat above London's Wood Green Shopping Centre.

More harsh facts are recounted even more starkly by those recalling their experiences in Iraq in Richard Jobson's The Somnambulists, which has been filmed in the manner of Joanna Kane's admired photographs. But any notions of formal rigidity are gleefully cast aside by Daniel Ededlstyn in How to Re-Establish a Vodka Empire, as he travels to the Ukrainian village of Dubouviazovka to trace the ancestry of his grandmother - the writer, dancer and painter Maroussia Zorokovich - and decides that the best way to honour the family legacy and boost the flagging local economy is to re-brand the vodka made on the estate once owned by his great grandfather.

Jonas Mekas also hails from the former Soviet Union and the Lithuanian avant-gardist is on fine form in three films in the Experimenta strand. In Sleepless Nights Stories, he presents the first episodes in his ambitious `1001 Nights' project, as he gathers incidents and anecdotes either involving or related by such art world luminaries as Marina Abramovic, Lee Stringer, Patti Smith, Adolfas Mekas, Harmony Korine, Patti Smith, Louis Garrel and Björk. However, he reduces the number of interlocutors to one in Correspondence: Jonas Mekas - JL Guerín, in which Mekas and the Spanish director of In the City of Sylvia (2007) keep each other up to speed about visits to Paris, Krakow, the Venice Film Festival and Henry David Thoreau's hut at Walden Forest and discuss such grand themes as cinema, realism, friendship, craft, poetry and life. Finally, Mekas also lines up alongside Robert Breer, Ken Jacobs, Michael Snow, M.M. Serra, Maurice Lemaître and Peter Kubelka in Pip Chodorov's Free Radicals: A History of Experimental Film, which also contains archive appearances by the likes of Hans Richter, Nam June Paik, Len Lye, Andy Warhol and Stan Vanderbeek.

Another exchange of filmic ideas was conducted by Albert Serra and Lisandro Alonso in The Lord Worked Wonders in Me and Unfilmed (A Letter for Serra). The first sees the director of Honour of the Knights (2006) moving the cast and crew of his Don Quixote rethink to the barren landscape of La Mancha and then letting them fall out with each other as they wait for him to show up. The absurdism of the Spaniard's uncompromising cinematic vision is celebrated by his Argentinian admirer as he alights upon a figure in the grass with a gun, a woodcutter and a man who has lost his dog in a meditation on the past we inherit and the future we shape. James Benning is renowned for his landscape chronicles, but he turns his lyrical lens on figures and faces in Twenty Cigarettes, in which subjects like film-maker Sharon Lockhart and academic Dick Hebdige are allowed to dictate the dynamic and duration of their segment by their preferred method of smoking.

Lastly, a pair of alternative lifestylers come under scrutiny in Mercedes Álvarez's Futures Market and Ben Rivers's Two Years At Sea. The first draws on the writings of the Greek poet Simonides of Ceos and works by Michelangelo and Bosch to contrast the frantic avariciousness of brokers playing for high stakes with other people's money and salesmen trained to exploit dreams with the converted garage store run by 92 year-old Jesús Castro, who only sells wares discarded by others. The second uses old 16mm cameras and monochrome stock to follow another hoarder of bric-a-brac, Jake Williams, on his perambulations around the forested terrain abutting his ramshackle retreat in the Aberdeenshire Cairngorms.