Preview: East End Film Festival, Various venues, London

The documentary film-maker Julian Cole's portrait of Gilbert and George is the opening night film at the East End film festival - appropriately enough, as the director spent a great deal of time with the artist duo at their Spitalfields home and studio during the 17 years he spent filming them.

So what does With Gilbert & George reveal about East End's oddest couple? George Passmore, who was born in Devon in 1942, and Gilbert Proesch, who was born in Italy in 1943, met as students on the sculpture course at London's St Martin's School of Art and soon became a "living sculpture".

"When you go round to Gilbert and George's restored wood-panelled house (it's like a creaking ship), they just make you a cup of instant coffee," says Cole. "They don't have a kitchen because they don't want to be distracted from their life's mission of creating and exhibiting their art. They eat in local cafés to save time."

Cole first met the couple when he modelled for them in 1986 while he was a film student at the Royal College of Art. When the student film-maker saw himself in the photograph See with Gilbert and George lying at his feet, "it was almost a sign" says Cole, to ask if he could make a documentary about them. "At the time, nobody was interested in a film about them," recalls Cole. "What a different story it is now." The last of Cole's footage shows the pair at the opening of their major retrospective at Tate Modern in February.

Other festival highlights include a sneak preview of Julien Temple's Joe Strummer: the Future is Unwritten, the UK premiere of John Pilger's The War on Democracy, a masterclass withThe Last King of Scotland producer Andrew Macdonald, whose new film 28 Weeks Later is set in Canary Wharf, and more than 100 shorts about the East End - some by local film-makers, including Tessa Garland's three-minute supermarket horror film Zombie, shot on a mobile phone.

'With Gilbert & George', showing tomorrow, opens the festival, which runs to 26 April; for further information, see www.eastendfilmfestival.com