FILM / Competition

John Ford's The Searchers (Thurs 11 Nov 8.00pm NFT1) is quite possibly the greatest Western ever made, and a regular title on critics' 'best films of all time' lists. A new print has now been struck, as part of the Champagne Piper-Heidsieck project to re-release important movies. We have five pairs of free tickets to this screening, plus videos of The Searchers and gift-boxes containing two bottles of Piper-Heidsieck champagne. The prize will be sent to the first five readers to answer this question: which actress played John Wayne's niece in the film? Entries on a postcard to: Searchers Competition, Listings, The Independent, 40 City Rd, London EC1Y 2DB.

FREE TICKETS

Five pairs of free tickets for the following five films await the first readers to bring a copy of this page to the London Film Festival box-office today after 10.30am (offer strictly subject to availability and limited to one pair of tickets per applicant). Seats are also still on sale for all these screenings.

Twist, a light-hearted documentary on the birth of 'the dance that changed a generation', traces its origins back to Chubby Checker and well beyond, and is aimed at both Sixties retreads and those too young to remember (Tonight 8.45pm NFT1).

Set in Paris during the winter of 1943, Claude Miller's The Accompanist is the story of a young pianist who enters the life of a family involved with the Resistance movement. Miller is noted for extracting powerful performances from his actors (he helped launch Charlotte Gainsbourg's career with An Impudent Girl), and his strong cast here includes the young actress Romaine Bohringer, who won a French Oscar for her performance in Savage Nights earlier this year and who plays the pianist opposite her father, Richard Bohringer, as her employer (Sunday 10.45pm Curzon West End).

The Long Silence, the new film by Margarethe von Trotta, is the story of a Roman judge caught up in a corruption and bribery scandal, told from his wife's point of view. Von Trotta, who has a strong track- record in powerful political film-making (The German Sisters; Rosa Luxemburg), was acclaimed for her new film when it premiered at Toronto this September (Sunday 11.00pm Lumiere Cinema).

I Love a Man in Uniform is a droll drama from the young Canadian director David Wellington. In it, a failed actor finally lands a role as a cop in an impressively bad TV show. He starts taking his uniform home 'to help him get into the role', inevitably falls in love with it, and the miserable cliches he enacts daily on TV, and eventually takes to harassing unsuspecting civilians on the street (Wed 10 Nov 8.45pm NFT1).

Samba Traore comes from one of West Africa's most accomplished new film-makers: Burkina Faso's Idrissa Ouedaogo, who is already known to British audiences for earlier films like Yaaba and Tilai. The new movie is about a man who holds up a petrol station and then becomes wracked with guilt; one critic has called it the first African film noir (Thurs 11 November 6.00pm NFT1).