Manchester Film Festival closes with exactly the right kind of film. Not something inflated for the sake of a finale, but a work that catches hold of one of the festival’s deeper currents.
California Schemin’ arrives at the end of 11 days of screenings, conversations, applause and immersion. In its story of borrowed voices and improvised entry points, it reflects something larger about the festival itself. This year’s edition has been the biggest yet. More than 10,000 tickets were sold, with screenings spread across HOME, Odeon Great Northern, Northern Light Cinema, Flix at the Treehouse Hotel, and Aviva Studios. The numbers tell one story. The better story is what it felt like to be there.
Kit Harington at Manchester Film Festival. Photo by Pete Shukie.
From the opening night, there was a shift. At Aviva Studios, hosting the opening pairing of films, the foyer was loud, open, and unselfconscious. People, talking, queueing, finding their way in. Film does that. It can take a guarded space and make it public in the best sense. Here, the tone for the festival was set. Kit Harington’s Psychopomp offered a darkly comic passage into the underworld, myth pulled into the present through crime and ritual. Jan Komasa’s The Good Boy followed with something colder, a film about punishment, family and control that was unsettling and sharply funny at once. They were different in approach, but linked by the way they landed in the room.
The screenings didn’t end at the credits. The conversations that followed carried the experience forward, providing a sense of shared space that ran across the week. At the Odeon, The Oldham Man and the Sea brought another register. Marc Ingham and Colin Offland’s documentary on Frank Rothwell had scale, humour and a kind of northern stubbornness that refused to be reduced to spectacle. Rothwell himself, present and generous, filled the room as much as the film did.
By closing night, California Schemin’ felt like a precise choice. James McAvoy’s movie follows two young men pushed to the edge by accent, class and the sense that culture is always being decided somewhere else. Their response is both comic and painful. They reinvent themselves through borrowed Californian accents, scanning maps, choosing a place, constructing identities that might travel further than their own.
Photo by Pete Shukie
The humour lands, but the force sits underneath it. Voice becomes strategy, accent becomes passage. Talent alone is not enough – you have to sound right, signal correctly, become legible to a culture that still listens selectively. The film understands the strain of that, but also the energy. The refusal to stay where you have been placed.
Manchester Film Festival doesn’t ask people to adopt a different voice in order to enter. Over 11 days, it opened spaces that can, at other times, feel coded or closed. Cinema remains one of the few art forms that can cut across social lines with real force. Part of it is the darkness, that levelling space where everyone is held in the same conditions. Part of it is the shared attention, the sense of being carried through the same sequence together. The applause at the end of a film never fades. It is recognition, appreciation, a shared response made audible.
All photos by Peter Shukie
