Lo and behold I came across Mike Mainieri's music again within days of hearing him play when looking for a new tune to work on from my current ABRSM jazz book.  A sign from on high?  Probably not but I'm now getting to grips with his Sara's Touch.

What with a saxophone weekend in the Lakes and a trip to the Hebrides I'm not going to see much of this year's film festival.  I did get to the so called opening gala, though the crowd of smartly bekilted and fashionably befrocked teeming down the steps of the Festival Theatre as a more modestly dressed crowd queued to get in rather suggested that I was going to a post gala screening.

Anyway Tommy's Honour is a very good film, well worth your seeing when it comes out on release.  The Tommy in question is the son of Old Tom Morris, both of them figures of renown in the development of golf in the 19th century and respectively youngest and oldest ever winners of the Open Championship.

The film tells a great story.  There is of course sporting triumph and defeat.  There is generational tension.  There is a love story. There is the class struggle between the gentry of the golf world and men like the Morrises.  And there is tragedy.  All of it filmed in Fife and East Lothian in six weeks during which, according to the director there was only one day of rain.

Another super family story was the highly fictional (I imagine) and highly entertaining Belle Famille. A businessman returns to France en route for a meeting in London after fifteen years in China.  He has a Chinese lady in tow to present to his mother and discovers there is a tussle over the former family home in the provinces.  The fiancee is also a colleague so he packs her off to London to keep the meeting warm for him while he investigates the old home situation.

His childhood chum is involved as is the local mayor and his late father's mistress.  He has a run in with the mistress's daughter (not sired by his own dad fortunately, otherwise social norms and possibly laws would clearly be in danger of being broken before the last reel has run).  Helped by a gloriously funny character who had a crush on him at school he finds out what dark deeds have been done in the past.

There's a scene at a concert worthy of a Brian Rix farce in which evryone runs in and out in pursuit of some aspect of the plot.  Our hero is always on the point of going to London but a turn of the plot always prevents him.  At one point he is run off the road by his childhood chum who has been in a relationship with the mistress's daughter but gets dumped and suspects it's all our hero's fault. Which of course it is. After numerous twists and turns it all ends happily for everyone as you would expect.

Jean-Paul Rappeneau, the screenwriter and director, known to us for his magnificent Cyrano starring Gerard Depardieu, was there for a Q&A but I didn't hang around for much of that.

Before that I saw an interesting documentary about Chile.  Chicago Boys described the influence of the moneterist school of economics centred on the University of Chicago on those Chileans who studied there.  In particular it focused on the period leading up to the overthrow of the Allende government and the subsequent dictatorship. Undoubted economic progress was made thanks to the plans and model developed by the Chicago Boys during the Pinochet period but at some cost.  One of them who served as Finance Minister made the barely believable statement that he was unaware of the human rights violations that occurred at the time.     

There was a more light-hearted air to the set of animations competing for the McLaren Award for new British animation that I saw earlier, though a couple of them had a darkish tinge.  I was particularly pleased to see Isabella the film I'd made an abortive attempt to see at the Glasgow Short Film Festival a few months ago.  Mind you I didn't give it my number 1 vote.  That went to a delightfully funny and thoroughly traditional animation about a cat's visit to the vet.  Unfortunately the competitors were split over two screenings and I couldn't get to the second so I only saw half the field.