Pete Walsh has been programmer at Dublin's Irish Film Institute for over ten years. He talks to Paul Farren about his career, and the task of selecting films for Ireland's premier cultural cinema.

Paul: How did you get into the business of cinema programming?

Pete: I ran a film society when I was in college and later when I was in university I was approached by a group of people from Birmingham Arts Lab. What we're talking about here is the tail end of the Sixties; they had set up a premises and they were looking to show arthouse films. I had a reputation for being the first person to show Andy Warhol films, that was the kind of thing they were interested in. So I did that on a part-time basis and it gradually developed into a full-time job that paid very badly.

What was the climate at the time for arthouse cinema?

There was one sort of commercial arthouse cinema at that time, but in the Sixties and Seventies the only way to sell foreign language on a commercial basis was by showing sex movies. So they would alternate some silly softcore porn with a new Alain Resnais or even a new Godard or a Truffaut. So it was very much a mixed bag as far as the Arts Lab was concerned; as the title would suggest they were basically countercultural people, so they were interested in Andy Warhol and more independent cinema.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 108.