Festival

Directed and written by Annie Griffin, Festival follows a menagerie of characters at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe. Included are a young actress staging a one-woman show about Wordsworth's sister; a priest with a one-man play about abuse in the church; a veteran Irish comic who takes to sleeping with a radio critic to secure a long-overdue award; a trio of Canadians who seem to constantly be on a high; a famous and stuck-up comedian who is at the festival to judge a comedy award with his long-suffering assistant in tow. The movie follows each as they prepare and perform and succeed and fail.

Some of the stories and characters interact while others do not, but they all capture the comedy and drama and frenetic backstage energy of a festival so huge in scope it encompasses everything from stand-up to experimental performance art. Some of the stories are played for laughs, others have a more serious tone, but each is engaging in its own way. The story with the priest might have a bit too much pathos, though. The cast is uniformly good and overall the movie was very entertaining.

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