Staying Fresh
Celebrating its tenth anniversary, the Fresh Film Festival has forged a reputation as a vibrant national event for young filmmakers. Stephen Moynihan caught up with festival director Jayne Foley to discuss their past, and look forward to the next ten years.

Stephen: How did the festival come about?

Jayne: Myself and Annette Maloney had just finished teacher training, and we knew that certain film-related stuff was going on in schools, particularly in Transition Year, so we sent out entry forms to schools. We were astonished with the feedback we got, so we decided to build a festival around it. Our core aims have remained to show features that are about young people’s lives, and classics that they may not get to see on television. We do study guides so the participants can read more about these films, and practical workshops to show them skills that they can replicate themselves. In the early stages we were doing crash-editing (which there’s no need for now), and hands-on workshops like acting and things like that. And then of course we gave a platform to young people to screen their films in front of an audience of their peers, which was really a big issue.

It really wouldn’t have happened without John Hunt, who was an amazing man. He gave us the funding for the first three years, a large amount of money at the time, and never looked for anything in return. After three years we were at the stage where we were able to start to look for Arts Council funding.

How has the festival developed over the last ten years?

We were amazed with the response in the first year; we got films from all over. It was all on VHS – we laugh now, but for judging and we’d have to bring two large holdall bags full of VHS tapes that we had to lug around with us. Now we have this little thing with all the DVDs in it. In the early days the sound was a problem, and some of the stuff was of lesser quality due to whatever they were making their films on then. That’s been the major change. Now everybody has access to all of this technology; they have it on their computers, they have their own cameras, everybody sends stuff on DVD with menus and out-takes.

Lots of young people focus on the competition element, but for us it’s really about showing their films and for them to create their own networks. It’s very interesting to see young people networking at the events; they make contacts and they meet up and work on projects.

The full article is printed in Film Ireland 116.