First women working as fishing guides on Laxá River, featured in new film, call for action after farmed fish escape

For seven generations, Andrea Ósk Hermóðsdóttir’s family have been fishing on the Laxá River in Aðaldalur. Iceland has a reputation as a world leader on feminism, but until recently women have not been able to work as guides to wild salmon fishing for visiting anglers – a job that has traditionally been the preserve of men.

The 21-year-old engineering student, her sister Alexandra Ósk, 16, and their friends Arndís Inga Árnadóttir, 18, and her sister Áslaug Anna, 15, are now the first generation of female guides on their river in northern Iceland, and among the very first female fishing guides in the country.

Playing a raging but inwardly terrified housewife, the actor and a fine supporting case are the intense focus of a story that cries out for closure

Anyone who has ever heard the director Mike Leigh interviewed will know that he is not a man who is given to enthusiasm. He doesn’t effuse; rather he growls, a bristly, whiskery warning to the world to keep its distance. Listening to him, you could be forgiven for assuming that, with a career spanning more than half a century, seven Oscar nominations, a Cannes Palme d’Or (for Secrets & Lies) and a Venice Golden Lion (for Vera Drake), Leigh is not much of a fan of anything to do with the film industry. But then you watch one of his films – his latest, Hard Truths, for example – and it becomes clear that there is one passion that remains undimmed over the years, one thing that he cherishes above all others. And that is actors and their craft.

The British director has a distinctive way of working that amplifies and embraces the contribution of his cast. This is not just a case of handing an actor a few inert lines on page and hoping for the best. His films are born out of an extended process of workshopping and rehearsals. Dialogue is chewed over; characters are fully lived in; stories are grown out of the fertile collaboration between director and performers. It’s a way of working that has pros and cons for the final film, but what’s undeniable is that Leigh’s method has helped give birth to some viscerally powerful performances over the years, the latest of which is a quite remarkable Bafta-nominated, British independent film awards-winning turn from Marianne Jean-Baptiste in the central role of housewife Pansy.

Only medical cannabis can stop Louis’ epileptic seizures, but the NHS refuses to supply it. Chris Petit and Emma Matthews have turned their fight into a film

That uniquely valuable British writer and independent film-maker Chris Petit, creator of downbeat classics such as Radio On from 1979 and An Unsuitable Job for a Woman from 1982, may not these days find it easy to get an outlet for his work; this would be appear to be his first feature credit for 15 years. But he and co-director, editor and partner Emma Matthews have emerged with a deeply personal movie: painful, complex, challenging and engaging.

Petit and Matthews riff and free-associate on the themes of memory, memory-loss and the moving image on video and celluloid, but at the centre of this is an urgent story from their own lives. In his early teens, their son Louis, now 22, a talented artist and musician, began to have epileptic seizures that wiped out his memories of childhood; some of these were of the type nicknamed “Alice in Wonderland” syndrome because of the resulting misperceptions of time and space – though these were scary, oppressive and brutal experiences very different from the beguiling world of Lewis Carroll.

Reliving the chaotic 90 minutes running up to launch of Saturday Night Live in 1975, Jason Reitman’s film delivers infectious energy minus the requisite edge

The behind-the-scenes drama, the high-stakes potential for disaster, the tussling egos, the promise of cultural impact or risk of ignominy: it’s not surprising that live television holds an enduring fascination for film-makers. For the most part, however, it has been news events and weighty current affairs programmes that get the big screen treatment, in films such as Ron Howard’s Frost/Nixon, George Clooney’s Good Night, and Good Luck, and the excellent forthcoming September 5, by Tim Fehlbaum.

Jason Reitman’s latest picture, Saturday Night, argues that comedy can make history too, particularly if, as in the case of the very first edition of Saturday Night Live, the cast are fighting, the green room is awash with cocaine, the studio heads are threatening to pull the plug, and there’s a llama backstage and nobody can remember why.

In UK and Irish cinemas

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