It was early to rise for unrepentingly grim Danish film When Heaven Falls.  A young woman who has been fostered travels back from Copenhagen to the country for the first time in years for the funeral of her birth mother. She is too traumatised to tell her brother and father who she is, and her horrified reaction at the news that she has two new young and pretty sisters hints fairly bluntly at why she left in the first place. She befriends both brother and sisters, without letting on who she is, and tries to help the two young ones. Then it turns out her brother is now a leading Neo-Nazi, and things just tumble down and down into dark, dark depths. The soundtrack grinds and screeches, the colours on the screen get greyer and grimmer and janey, there is just no escape. That the film is based on a true story, makes it even harder to watch.

Some festival fatigue perhaps lead to me sleeping out the opening film of day five at the SEFF (Seville-set rom-com Orange Blossom Girl), but I did make it down to the Teatro Lope de Vega for the next screening - French, German and Israeli co-production Jaffa, directed by Keren Yedaya. It's a quasi-Romeo and Juliet story set amid the grease and grime of a small family-run garage workshop in urban Israel.  

Monday started with a trip to the Teatro Lope de Vega for Lourdes, which was, as I'd feared, about the French holy resort. The film, from Viennese director Jessica Hausner, was surprisingly entertaining though, neither taking a defensive Catholic standpoint or coming over all superior and judgmental about the deluded pilgrims or tacky souvenir shops.

Day three of the festival, and after less hours sleep than maybe would have been best, and a slightly frantic search through central Seville for somewhere open and serving take-away coffee, it was back to the Teatro Lope de Vega for the 9AM screening of Men on the Bridge from Turkish director Asli Özge. The film is a look at ordinary life in Istanbul, following three men - a traffic cop, rose seller and taxi-driver - through their daily lives as played out or near the huge Bosphorous spanning bridge which dominates the city.