If this year’s Academy Awards taught us anything, it’s that Americans will always appreciate creative moviemaking professionals who speak English but are not American.
Consider how many of such people worked on the recent crop of Oscar-nominated films, from Slumdog Millionaire to The Reader to The Dark Knight to The Duchess to Happy-Go-Lucky to In Bruges. Even the particularly American stories — Revolutionary Road, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Frost/Nixon — were chock full of Brits, and the quintessentially American awards program itself was hosted by an Australian.
Maybe it’s because we find their accents seductive. Or, especially as in cases when they conceal their accents, maybe it’s because they remain foreign and exotic yet still gracious enough to not make us read subtitles.
Anyway, none of the movies mentioned above are playing in the inaugural Mostly British Film Series, a co-presentation of the San Francisco Neighborhood Theater Foundation and the California Film Institute, but who cares, because quite a few promising and similarly credentialed others are.
Having culled eight days worth of heartwarmers, crowd pleasers and challengers from selections of the Toronto, Edinburgh and Sydney film festivals, the new series’ organizers have arranged for several auspicious Bay Area premieres. They are mostly British, the thinking goes, so we know we can count on them.
