directed by Dan Ireland, produced by Carl Jan Colpaert and Dan Ireland -- Liberty Theatre, Hamilton.

While film has been the only new art form, and certainly the most ubiquitous influence of this century, Bermuda has been curiously reluctant in its embrace of the big screen; while interest and involvement in the rest of the visual and performing arts over the past couple of decades has been impressive, progress in the field of cinematic art has been perfunctory, to say the least.

Various clubs for film buffs have been formed in the past and, just as quickly, dissolved. Matters were not helped when Hamilton's two cinemas, already struggling to attract customers with movies that were often months old, were demolished to make way for office buildings.

Now, there are four cinemas and, best of all, Bermuda gets most of the top-rated films almost as soon as they are released in the US. Presumably then, the next logical step was a film festival to celebrate our new-found sophistication. That has now happened and, if the first offering at last night's opening was a typical sampling of things to come, Bermuda should be on the right track for recognition as a valid film festival location.

1930s Texas, with its small towns and vast, sweeping vistas provides the lush and visually compelling setting for Dan Ireland's `The Whole Wide World'.

Tender, funny, brilliantly scripted (by Michael Scott Myers), voluptuously filmed by Claudio Rocha (of `Like Water for Chocolate' fame) and with an ending that cries out for Kleenex, it is a true story that centres around Robert E. Howard, the eccentric pulp fiction writer who, even before his untimely death, had become a cult figure with his fantastical creations of Conan the Barbarian, Red Sonja and King Kull.

Deeply mistrusted by the good, Bible-toting folk of his tiny Texan home town, Howard is as contemptuous of his neighbours as they are of the crazy young man who scribbles his outlandish stories. As they mutter disapprovingly, he revels in the gut emotions of creation, punching his way through imaginary crowds as he reels off another of his preposterous yarns of mythic heroes -- bawdishly sexy and brimming with blood and gore -- for the delectation of the deserted main street. Not for Robert Howard any home-spun tales of this panoramic, sun-baked land of immigrants who have made an uneasy alliance with the native Indians: his lineage harks back to the swashbuckling heroes shrouded in the mists of Celtic pasts where outsize heroes do battle with dragons and barbarians.

Into this exciting, if withdrawn world which he shares with his distant, doctor father and an adoring but fatally sick mother, steps a young schoolteacher. The film is the story of their ensuing, poignant yet always witty love story.

Resembling his great heroes in size at least, Vincent D'Onofrio turns in a dazzling performance as the shy, ungainly writer who nevertheless gives a virtuoso account of his singularly bizarre world ("I only get half a cent a word but I'm verbose'') as he woos Novalyne beneath an impossibly beautiful and high harvest moon. This is a man, however, who makes some salient observations about the real world he inhabits, predicting for instance, that `sex' would soon take over the world -- after all, "rape and murder took place on the stage just before Rome fell''. He is matched by a meltingly attractive performance, from Renee Zellweger, the spirited yet gentle young woman who is attracted, not only by his undoubted genius with words, but also his unconventional attitude to life. As Novalyne realised, he was indeed "one who walked alone'' and it is on her memoir of this Texan titan that this film was based -- and to whom it is dedicated.

Cloying in her hold over her son even as this faded beauty drifts towards painful death, Ann Wedgeworth conveys a gorgeously understated air of martyred possession that speaks, ever so faintly, of incestuous climes.

Director Ireland, who was co-founder and co-director of the Seattle International Film Festival, and received the Golden Calf Award from Holland's film industry back in 1982, has eloquently trod the difficult tightrope of presenting an ultimately heartbreaking love story, elevating that common theme with an uncommonly literary and humour-filled script which often makes you laugh out loud yet, to the very end, holds an element of suspense. This is assisted by his wide embrace of the Texas landscape which, although harbouring no gaelic giants, has a scorching immensity and grandeur of its own.

A brilliant and triumphant start to Bermuda's first-ever Film Festival -- more, please! PATRICIA CALNAN REVIEW REV FILM FESTIVAL MOVIES MPC