Dinard 2010: Skeletons, Soulboy and Treacle Jr

The Festival Du Film Britannique De Dinard is the best kept secret in the whole festival calendar, a five-day event that sees this tiny fishing town swamped by a single planeload of British talent. To name but a few, accompanying Empire on the BA flight there and back were Black Death director Chris Smith, Shane Meadows and his producer Mark Herbert, Exam director Stuart Hazeldine, Peter Mullan, Mr Nice director Bernard Rose, Cherry Tree Lane director Paul Andrew Williams and the Made In Dagenham producing combo of Steve Woolley and Elizabeth Karlsen. Compared to Cannes, it's miniscule, but the upside of that is that there's plenty of time to meet and talk with the various film teams (as they call them in France). The downside is that once you edit out all the off-the-record conversations, there's not a lot to say about the festival except to say that you went.

However, it's a great place to catch up with British movies, since French release patterns are somewhat behind ours. And two I'd been meaning to catch up with since Edinburgh were in the main competition, which was being judged by a jury that included our own Sienna Miller and Nick Moran. The first of these entries was Nick Whitfield's Skeletons, winner of the Michael Powell prize at the Scottish fest. Described as “Inception on the dole” (well, so one on the film's stars, Ed Gaughan, told me), Skeletons is an incredibly inventive and likeable comedy about two psychic private investigators, Bennett (Andrew Buckley) and Davis (Gaughan), who literally go through their clients' closets to find out their hidden secrets. In the course of their work, they are hired by Jane (the wonderful Paprika Steen), an eccentric but well-to-do woman who lives in a tumbledown cottage with her two children. Jane's husband has vanished, and so Davis and Bennett get to work – but the truth about Jane's predicament turns out to be less mysterious than it sounds. It's rough around the edges, but Skeletons is a great and different low-budget comedy-drama that deserves to be seen (it's available on DVD right now).

I'd also recommend Shimmy Marcus's Soulboy, which, though much more schematic, is a really charming feelgood movie too, one that, though it ticks all the old coming-of-age-story boxes, has real atmosphere, a great soundtrack and a wonderful performance from Martin Compston. Basically, Compston plays a boy who gets into Northern Soul to impress a pretty hairdresser (Nicola Burley), and the rest is Gregory's Girl. I'd have liked it to have gone more into the subculture – the music is incidental; Northern Soul could easily be replaced by, say, heavy metal – and the film's attempts to cross over actually work against it. But, for what it is, Soulboy is very good, and further proof that Compston should be a much bigger star.

Finally, we come to Jamie Thraves' Treacle Jr (pictured), an odd-duck, ultra-low-budget indie that was wholly financed by its director, who remortgaged his house to pay for it. The film screens at the LFF, where I definitely think you should catch it, if you can. It stars Tom Fisher as Tom, a northern family man who inexplicably ups and leaves his wife and baby, throwing away his credit cards and sleeping rough on the streets of London. After being beaten up by yobs, Tom goes to the casualty department of a nearby hospital, where he meets Aiden (Aiden Gillen), a fantastically annoying Irishman with a lisp and a few screws loose. While he sorts his life out, Tom finds himself drawn into Aiden's orbit, and the film plays out very much like a Danish Dogme film from the early 2000s. I wouldn't say I loved it, but the film's mix of dark comedy and harsh drama kept me hooked, and Gillen walks a real tightrope, trying to keep his character on the right side of sympathetic. When the awards were dished out, Treacle Jr shared the main prize with the much more commercial Made in Dagenham (titled We Want Sex in France), which ought to give Thraves' brave film a much-needed break.