So Novem­ber was a busy month for me and for Wax­wing. Wax­wing was screened at the Beijing Film Academy Inter­na­tional Film Fest­ival, was selec­ted for the Lon­don Short Film Fest­ival in Janu­ary 2013 and has been selec­ted to fea­ture as one of five final­ists in the Lon­don Film Review’s web shorts film fest­ival that begins tomor­row. Vot­ing begins on their web­site on Monday 19^th Novem­ber and the fest­ival runs for one week so visit  http://​www​.thel​on​don​film​re​view​.co​.uk/ and enjoy the films and cast your vote.

Wax­wing has found a nest, at the Brit­ish Coun­cil, in the branches of its ‘shorts sup­port scheme’. It’s excel­lent news for the film and me and all who worked on it and I hope the film fest­ival com­mis­sion­ers who will view it at the Brit­ish Coun­cil screen­ings will be moved to nur­ture and help Wax­wing fledge. Meta­phor stretched quite enough I think. I’d like  to say thanks to The Brit­ish Coun­cil for believ­ing in the film and also to Waxwing’s agent Rebekah Smith at Met­film, my ‘film fest­ival doc­tor’ for work­ing so hard on the film’s behalf.

Rather sad to say good bye to Jed Mercurio’s abso­lutely ter­rific Line Of Duty on BBC2 tonight. Quite the most soph­ist­ic­ated, ‘real-feeling’, com­plex, emo­tion­ally truth­ful and chillingly cred­ible Brit­ish tele­vi­sion ‘policier’ I have seen in a long while. Barely a missed step or a wrong-note across four-hours of highly demand­ing tele­vi­sion screen­writ­ing. The cast were (excuse the pun) uni­formly out­stand­ing. Len­nie James, save for when he is required to run in wide shot (he has more than enough else on offer), is an extraordin­ary tal­ent, never mannered, pas­sion­ate, open and hon­est with hefty but eleg­antly car­ried emo­tional bal­last. Vicky McLure and Mar­tin Compston, fairly new faces to our screens but fast prov­ing their tal­ent for bewil­der­ing authenticity,emotional range and char­ac­ter ver­sat­il­ity, were already huge favour­ites of mine. They shone in their roles as good cop­pers hor­ribly com­prom­ised by garden vari­ety human weak­ness, pro­fes­sional func­tion and insti­tu­tion. In terms of a dir­ect­ors approach to pho­to­graph­ing a drama, the last epis­ode shone bright­est, achiev­ing a cun­ning con­fla­tion of flu­ency and jag­ged­ness that com­ple­men­ted the story and themes per­fectly and had me sigh­ing in admir­a­tion and envy on my sofa. I must find someone who can tell me how to build what seem cam­era set-ups of bewil­der­ing fra­gil­ity and feel con­fid­ent that you have the story in the can at wrap. A new name to me (I am so slow off the mark) Ruairi O’Brien pho­to­graphed all with moody, magical groun­ded panache. Quite brilliant.

I have been urged by a friend to view the trailer for the  latest film from the USA’s second greatest liv­ing film maker, and it didn’t disappoint. The Mas­ter is such a tan­tal­ising pro­pos­i­tion, PT Ander­son is a mas­ter story-teller and he under­stands and seems to thrill in the magical poten­tial of cinema storytelling like no other for my money. The world of the story too has me alive with anti­cip­a­tion. I have been try­ing to find a cine­matic story about Cults and New Reli­gions for years and have now been beaten to it twice in as many years.Bother!  And what a fab­ulous cast too. I for one can barely wait.