This year, BIFF welcomes back a number of friends, and two in particular stand out. Fans of Russian director Alexei Balabanov will be happy to know his new film, Morphia, is screening, and Catherine Breillat returns with her latest offering, Bluebeard, which is sure to attract a new following of fans for this talented French director.

Balabanov is building a strong fanbase, with Cargo 200 attracting good crowds at last year's festival and Of Freaks and Men proving popular with BIFF fans back in 1999. Morphia is sure to cement his reputation with BIFF regulars.

Morphia tells the story of young Dr Polyakov, who arrives in a small provincial Russian town in 1917. While a hit with the townsfolk, he is secretly battling a crippling addiction to morphine.

Based on Mikhail Bulgakov's Notes of a Young Doctor, Morphia focuses on the writer's own experience as a country doctor in Kiev while fighting a severe addiction to morphine.

The film features graphic real-life surgery scenes that have attracted strong criticism. However, Balabanov makes no excuses for his honest and confronting approach.

‘Maybe those critics and I live in different countries. Weren't they born in the Soviet Union? Could they have forgotten everything?' he said.

Despite its depiction of harsh reality, Balabanov claims Morphia is not about drugs nor meant to be anti-drugs. He wants viewers to come to their own conclusions about the film.

‘Bulgakov wrote an autobiographical book. He got off the need in time and he was saved but that's a rare occurrence,' he said. ‘The ending of the film is more natural: a talented man is on a downward path until he hits rock bottom. That happens pretty often and not just because of drugs. There are a lot of temptations all around.'

Catherine Breillat's An Old Mistress brought her to the attention of festival goers in 2007, and Bluebeard is sure to cement her reputation with BIFF audiences. With Bluebeard, she brings a modern twist to this seventeenth-century Charles Perrault fairy tale, a childhood favourite with the young Breillat and her older sister.

‘Fairy tales often have main characters who are sort of serial killers of children: in other words, ogres,' she said.

‘I was five; [my sister] was a year older. I used to read Bluebeard out loud to her, terrified in advance myself but invigorated by the fact that I knew (and hoped) that she, the older one, would break down and beg me, in tears, to stop.

'And that invariably gave me the courage to resist beyond my own strength and prolong the breathless terror to the very end.'

Not surprisingly, this adaptation evokes its fair share of spine-chilling moments. Bluebeard is an evocative and powerful film that will ensure Breillat remains a regular on the BIFF programme.


By Liz Smith