The line-up for this year’s Raindance Film Festival, taking place from 28th September to 9th October, has been announced over at the festival’s official site, and it’s got some pretty interesting films playing across the twelve days.

This year is the festival’s nineteenth year running, and it has a history of debuting some of the best and most well-known independent films in recent years, including The Blair Witch Project, Memento, and Oldboy.

Raindance will be holding almost a hundred UK premieres this year, and over thirty international premieres, along with screening more than a hundred shorts, including Sailcloth, starring John Hurt, running at seventeen minutes without any dialogue.

“Raindance Film Festival is Europe’s leading independent film festival. Listed by Variety as one of the world’s top 50 ‘unmissable film festivals’, Raindance aims to nurture, support and promote independent films and filmmakers from the UK and around the world. Our festival is known for being bold, edgy and sometimes daring, screening all genres of feature fiction and documentary (over 70 UK Premieres a year) and over 200 shorts, making it the most noted festival of discovery and for launching debut filmmakers in Europe.”

Opening the festival on the 28th September will be the UK premiere of Another Earth:

“Directed by Mike Cahill, the haunting indie sci-fi drama, released by Fox Searchlight, was co-written and stars on-to-watch newcomer Brit Marling alongside William Mapother (Lost). On the night that a duplicate planet Earth is discovered in the solar system, an ambitious young astrophysics student (Marling) and an accomplished composer (Mapother) cross paths in a tragic accident and the lives of these strangers become irrevocably intertwined. Another Earth will screen on 28th Sept at Cineworld Haymarket, giving Raindance audiences a chance to see it ahead of its wider release in the UK in December. Brooklyn-based band Fall On Your Sword, who composed the original score for Another Earth, will be performing at the Opening Night After-Party.”

If you’re going to be at Raindance this year, Another Earth definitely sounds like a film worth checking out if you can, after being received pretty well at Sundance at the start of the year. Closing the festival this year will be Bonsai:

“The closing film is ‘slacker romance’ Bonsai – the second film from cult Chilean director Christian Jimenez. The movie adaptation of the much lauded Chilean novel of the same name and loosely structured around Proust’s Remembrance of Things Past, the story centres on the ill-fated love affair between two college students. Featuring pitch-perfect performances together with superb direction from one of Chile’s rising stars, this will be Bonsai’s UK premiere.”

Among the dozens of other films to be screened at Raindance are Acts of Godfrey, starring Simon Callow and Harry Enfield; A Thousand Kisses Deep, starring Dougray Scott, Jodie Whittaker, Emilia Fox, and David Warner; Argentinian director Miguel Cohan’s No Return, a story about an innocent man wrongly accused of a fatal hit and run; and Croatian director Rajko Grlic’s Just Between Us, which is:

“a warm tale of infidelity charting the convoluted love lives of two brothers, their wives and their mistresses.”

Given the number of feature films and shorts playing at Raindance, I thought I’d highlight some of the ones that sound pretty awesome to me. If you’re thinking of going at the end of the month, then you can check out the full line-up here. There are plenty of other great films playing, definitely with something for all film fans.

Each year, the festival also puts out a trailer promoting it directed by the winner of last year’s Film of the Festival Award. This year, that meant that Alexandra Brooklyn was given the directing duties, and she’s come up with a pretty fantastic trailer, which I’ve embedded below, and you can read more about her and her work on the project here.

It’s just a few short weeks until the festival kicks off, so be sure to get your tickets early when they go on general sale this Friday, 9th September. There’s also currently an early-bird package available at a discounted price from the official site here, which it says includes a ticket to the opening and closing night films, Another Earth and Bonsai.