So I was also treated to sterling performances by Sir Ian Holm (The Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring, eXistenZ , A Life Less Ordinary, Sweet Hereafter, Fifth Element, Big Night ,Madness of King George, Naked Lunch ,Hamlet ,Henry V ,Dance with a Stranger , Brazil), Stuart Wilson (Vertical Limit, The Luzhin Defence, Enemy of the State, The Mask of Zorro, Death and the Maiden, The Age of Innocence, Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles III, Lethal Weapon 3), Judi Dench (The Importance of Being Earnest, Shipping News, Iris, Chocolat, The World Is Not Enough, Tea with Mussolini, Shakespeare in Love, Tomorrow Never Dies, Mrs. Brown,Hamlet, GoldenEye, Henry V, A Handful of Dust, 84 Charing Cross Road, A Room with a View),Tim McInnerny (Black Adder, 101 and 102 Dalmatians, Rogue Trader, Notting Hill, Richard III, Erik the Viking), and Leeds' very own Tom Wilkinson (The Full Monty, The Patriot, Rush Hour, Shakespeare in Love, In the Bedroom).

Wetherby is an eery and compelling film set only a few miles from where I grew up. It was David Hare's first foray into film directing and he took with him both his concern for the personal and his ability to stage a character's past through her present relations. In the film he uses intercut scenes of a young Joely Richardson playing the young Jean Travers (whose adult self is played superbly by Redgrave) to dramatize her youth. The relationship of these flashback scenes to reality, and their relevance, is left ambiguous but the field of possibilities is fertile. The film is slow and goes over the same ground time and time again, but finds new revelations each time, whilst building suspense.

I watched two very different films on a much-needed break from wedding preparations, but like Thich Nhat Hanh's teaching that the entire universe is present in a single piece of paper (the paper depends for its existence on the lumbermen, mill workers, and truck drivers, who all depend on their parents and grandparents; the trees depend on the Earth and its climactic systems, rapidly endangered; the words on the minds of the writer, editor, and reader; etc.), I participated in more cultural events than I can even imagine. Our information-rich moment has the power to bring joy and perplexity, to enable and confuse, to bring us more than we need. More is connected than we think

Dan Friedman is film editor of Zeek. He just got married.

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