Andrew Scott's Elsinore to Close the Camerimage Festival in Toruń
Andrew Scott's film Elsinore will close the 34th Camerimage festival in Toruń, Poland, according to The Hollywood Reporter. The closing screening is set for Saturday 14 November at 8:30pm.
Camerimage is a film festival built around cinematography, the craft of deciding where the camera sits and how the light falls. It is organised by the TUMULT Foundation and runs from 7 to 14 November. Its films are picked for the way they look as much as for their stories, so a closing slot carries weight with the festival's audience of filmmakers and camera crews.
Elsinore was directed by Simon Stone, with a screenplay by Stephen Beresford. The cinematographer is Mike Eley, the person responsible for the film's images. It is a biographical drama about the AIDS crisis, and it follows the Scottish actor Ian Charleson, best known for Chariots of Fire. Scott plays Charleson.
In the film, Charleson throws himself into one last stage performance of Hamlet in the final days of his life, before he dies of AIDS. Olivia Colman, Joe Locke and Johnny Flynn also star.
The film has already had a busy autumn. It premiered at the Telluride festival in the United States, then opened the BFI London Film Festival in October, where Scott and Colman were on hand for the start of the run. Deadline described that London opening as a homecoming screening.
Awards season is also moving. The Guardian reported that Elsinore is in contention for 12 British Independent Film Awards, the Bifas, including one for Scott's performance.
Scott has spoken about the subject itself. He told Variety that films should still tackle the AIDS crisis, a subject that he believes still needs telling.
For readers outside the film world, a closing film is the last title a festival chooses to leave audiences with. For this one, that means the final night of Camerimage will end on a film about a man, a stage, and the illness that took him, in a festival that spends its week looking at how pictures are made.
