It seems a shame to be in a city that offers such a fantastic film festival and not attend any of the showings. Its actually been three years since my first (and only) London Film Festival so as with 2004 I’ve decided to see a wide variety of shows. This year my selections included a Mexican film, a Rwandan film, a South American film and one from the States.

First up for tonight was La Zona, a Mexican film directed by Uruguayan-born Rodrigo Pla. La Zona tells the tale of a gated community in Mexico. In this Mexico there is a very clear dividing line between the haves and the have nots. The story begins when one evening three thieving boys break into the community during a storm and power outage but, as always seems the case, things go horribly wrong. Two of the boys die and a member of the community dies along with a security guard. The thief that manages to escape this initially confrontation finds himself nevertheless trapped within the walls of the community. The rest of the movie explores the subsequent attempted cover-up and horrors of vigilante justice.

Before the movie I’d met up with James, Ari and Breda for a cocktail which nearly proved to be a mistake because not too long after that I started to feel very sleepy. Thankfully La Zona grips you right from the beginning and does not let you go until the final horrific violent finale. An amazing feature film debut from the director the greatest aspect of the movie is that it does not paint one person or group of people as being the bad guy(s) and the others the good guy(s) – you can easily sympathise with any character though no doubt certain scenes do leave an awful taste in your mouth.

One of the more interesting aspects of film festivals are the Q&A sessions. We had a particularly insightful Q&A session with La Zona’s Spanish producer who brought us some background on the making of the film and how they actually had to shop around to find somewhere they could film it. Apparently these gated communities are fairly common in South America but not many countries were up for having it filmed in their country. As it was they were careful not to actually state explcitly in the film that it was filmed in Mexico. Despite this the producer jokingly stated that the director can never return to Mexico for fear of reprisal!

La Zona was a brilliant start to my 2007 London Film Festival.