San Francisco is one place this happens for and is perhaps not so surprising – it is a pretty distinctive place after all and the imagery was already familiar from countless movies and TV shows before I ever went there. What was a bit more surprising was a random suburban area in South Korea; Korea has had a real building boom amid all the growth it’s had which has resulted in a certain look and feel to the architecture and the cities being very common though not distinctive of any once place. That’s the space where a lot of the more “real world” Korean films are set, and it’s the one I recognise. Don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that ventured into Itaewon (이태원동), mind you.

It’s a much stronger feeling of recognition than I get with anywhere in the UK, I think purely due to the surprise factor. Having a good picture of Edinburgh isn’t a great surprise, finding how quickly I’ve built one up of places on other continents much more so.

Two films I saw early on that really stood out were Moon and Exam, two low budget indie science fiction films. Moon has had an awful lot of publicity already so I won’t repeat what other people have said about it. Exam is a very tight, taut thriller – eight people in a room in the final test of a long interview process, one of whom will get the job. Both films looked great – a testament to how affordable good CGI has become. I’ll be interested to see what follows them now there’s some examples of low budget SF out there, and I’m not sure what to make of the fact that both of the films were British.

Pontypool was also excellent, a zombie movie about the dangers, or possibily salvation, of talk radio. If you see it (which you should) make sure you stay for the end of the credits.

Also good was Modern Love is Automatic. It’s a low budget indie flick which reminded me an awful lot of The Unbelievable Truth partly in terms of visual design but more in the way it decided to just jump off and handle things in a totally non-naturalistic fashion. It’s a really tricky thing to pull off without looking like you just don’t care about the audience (witness a lot of “experimental” films) but it’s very impressive when it works and it worked here.

On the down side Dario Argento’s Giallo had the audience laughing, and I’m fairly sure it was an at laugh rather than a with laugh. There came a point in the film where it felt like they’d just run out of enthusiasm for the whole thing and were just throwing anything on the screen to tie up the loose ends. Very disappointing at a film festival. That was the only real blip, though – overall it was good though there was cost cutting in evidence.

This being a Dogma 95 film there is little need to wait for a HD version – the Dogma rules are all about getting back to basics including all-natural lighting and handheld camerawork done with low end cameras. This means there’s really not any detail to miss, instead there’s a visceral, documentary style feel. Really the film is all one big sequence of formal exercises – the Dogma rules are obviously a big formalism, the plot is very Jacobean and the whole thing revolves around a rather grand birthday party with bow ties and a toastmaster. The thing that really hooks me is the contrast between all this formality and the content, which is fairly brutal and emphasised by the visual style. I find this sort of setup endlessly fascinating when it’s done well.

This is obviously a subject that has been gone over in the media but not in this form – as ever, Morris mostly just lets his subjects talk and leaves it up to the viewer to put their own intepretation on what is being said, foregrounded even more here by the presence of the person responsible for sifting through the images describing going through exactly this process with the images. The effect is much more chilling than the condemnation of the media – the body language and the words of the soldiers speak volumes but nothing gives you enough distance to simply switch off and say “I’m not like them.”

The people in the film who feel they can say that do not always appear as morally distinct as they might hope to. The title comes from one of the things that had to be done when examining the images during the investigation – the investigator had to decide which of the images showed things that were perfectly normal interrogation techniques (the standard operating procedure) and which were crimes. His verdicts aren’t always what you might expect.

The script and acting both share many of the best elements of Kevin Smith’s work, being very funny but in the context of a real drama with engaging and very real characters. The humour is never a result of consequenceless gags – the characters say and do things that are funny but this always feels natural and if what they’re doing is not actually terribly clever it’s obvious that they feel the results.

This would make for a very good movie even if that were all that was going on (it might be something close to 2 Days in Paris, another great movie that was at the Edinburgh Film Festival this year) but the way the film is shot adds an extra something. Everything is shot in a clean 1940s black and white, complete with soft focus for the leading lady, and manages to make LA appear beautiful in a way that it rarely does. The visual style softens some of the hard edges that the script has – there’s a constant reminder of a fundamentally nice kind of film, making everything feel much warmer than it might have done. This warmth is the main thing I took away from the film and judging from the atmosphere in the room during the Q&A afterwards I don’t think I was alone.

The film being released in cinemas in the US on Valentine’s Day 2008, hopefully it’ll get a cinema release over here too. Seeing it in the cinema is may be the only chance to see the original black and white version – a colourised version is being prepared for the DVD release, though I hope that both versions will be included.