Ben Hopkins may never have made a feature before, but that didn't worry producer Robert Jones (The Usual Suspects) in the slightest. Hopkins' award-winning short films were enough to convince Jones that the young writer-director was ready to embark on an endeavour as ambitious as Simon Magus.

This is no usual debut feature. Hopkins' screenplay was inspired in equal measure by Central European folklore, spaghetti westerns and industrial history. "The nature of the story is very timeless and very placeless," says Jones. "It has an element of fable to it: the film has its roots in folktale rather than historical fact."

Hopkins' "magical tale from a vanished world" (as it is billed) unfolds in late 19th Century Silesia. Noah Taylor (so assured as the teenage David Helfgott in Shine) plays Simon, a sort of "holy fool" persecuted by his fellow villagers who hold him responsible for everything from the failure of the crops to the milk souring. In reality, the local community has been devastated by the arrival of a new steam railway, which has taken away all the local trade. This is a village perched perilously between two competing eras. On the one hand, there is the new industrial order and, on the other, the old, rural world, steeped in superstition. Geoffrey Macnab