With shorts before the main features.

Five years after their first visit to Topsham’s Matthews Hall, the South West Group returned to the Devon town for their Autumn Viewing at the end of October. Over 90 delegates from 23 Societies travelled from all over the region from Swindon to Looe to enjoy a successful day previewing six new titles of DVD and excellent catering at the nearby Globe Hotel.

The two titles topping the ratings highlighted the efforts being made to ensure that non mainstream films find an audience with film societies and community cinemas. Mao’s Last Dancer, has not had a commercial release in the UK despite rave reviews in Australia, home of its director, the renowned Bruce Beresford. Moviola, the rural cinema charity, has negotiated UK non-theatrical rights on DVD until January 2013; on its showing at Topsham, it should do well with community cinemas. A close second in the voting, the Canadian drama, Incendies, is one of the latest titles to be added to the BFFS DVD Booking catalogue also ensuring that the best films from international festivals are available to UK viewers. The other titles were well received including Oranges and Sunshine, from Jim Loach following in his father Ken’s tradition of hard-hitting films with a social conscience, A Separation, humanising the Iran of today, and the American independent hit Win Win, directed by Film Society favourite Tom McCarthy (Station Agent), were close behind. The intriguing and elegiac Italian Le Quattro Volte divided the Topsham audience but with a slim majority awarding an A or a B, hopefully some societies will take a risk and show this extraordinary film next season.

The Topsham host society also organised a hotly contested Film Quiz with bottles of wine as prizes donated by the latest community cinema to join the South West Group – Honiton; this was to thank the Group for helping to organise their successful launch screening a few days before the Viewing.

Here are the answers to the movie quiz in a Word document.