Conspiracies, hookers and bombs – welcome to the Odessa Film Festival

Odessa, the pearl of the Black Sea, is one of the most charming port cities you can imagine, the centre of the city mainly 19th-century Italian and French architecture. Like a run-down Riviera, but with the exchange rate gone from 8 grivnas to the pound to 34, it’s fabulously cheap for visitors. At my favourite Azeri restaurant, which doesn’t sell wine, they offered to go to the supermarket and buy me a bottle of red. £1.50 for perfectly drinkable Ukrainian plonk. The rate has dived due to the unrest and war in the East of course. On the surface things are somewhat calmer than last year when a fire killed dozens in a trade union building.

There’s enough instability and sporadic bombing, however, to keep people on their toes. The one evening I managed an early night I was woken up by the sound of a bomb going off outside Libertine, a gay club.