Fern Bain Smith

A quirky Tinder match between a queer Romanian and a London baker leads to a culture-clashing ride through awkward truths, identity, and unexpected intimacy.

An experimental re-telling of the last days of the Romanov sisters.

Do you look back on the optimism of the 1997-2001 era as a lost golden age, or do you see it as a period of naïvety, delusion and folly? There’s a lot of nostalgia for the nineties at the moment, especially from people too young to remember it who see the decade as a simpler, pre-internet time. Modern nostalgia often draws on corporate American-90s mall culture, but what about British culture? With I’ve Been Trying To Tell You – made to accompany the Saint Etienne album of the same name – director Alasdair McLellan evokes the era through the fog of memory. The resulting film, shot in locations from Grangemouth to Portmeirion to Southampton, is both beautiful and enveloping.