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Every now and then you see a film that you don’t know anything about and experience everything about it in a fresh way. I didn’t know much about Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself except that it was set in Glasgow and it was a Scottish / Danish coproduction. It’s one of my favourite films of the festival. It hit me just the right way. It was directed by the Danish director Lone Sherfig. It’s a post dogme film that explores similar themes, without the arbitrary rules. It tells the story of a pair of brothers, one suicidal (Jamie Sives)and one selfless (Adrian Rawlins). Then it brings in a single mother (Shirley Henderson) and her daughter (Lisa McKinlay) and the threads of the story begin to weave together. I found out later that it was shot on HD, but it’s not the way that it is shot that caught me, but the characters and situations.
It reminded me a bit of Diane Keaton’s 1995 film Unstrung Heroes which I also loved. Part of the please of Wilbur Wants to Kill Himself is in the exploration of the complex relationships that we have with those around us and the much greyer world of decisions, choices and morality. It screens tonight at the Atlantic Film Festival at the Park Lane cinemas.