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JDIFF Diary
Sheena Sweeney’s day-by-day diary of the Jameson Dublin International Film Festival that took place 12–22 February 2009, including interviews with Gráinne Humphreys, Thierry Frémaux, Paolo Sorrentino, John Crowley and Aisling Walsh.
Film festivals have a reputation as being all ‘arty farty’, and for some reason that’s considered bad. Which is funny, because the whole idea of a festival is to open cinema up for audiences, to offer people with something they might not normally have the chance to see, rather than alienating anyone with, say, the pressures of subtitles. Although there are those who, understandably, don’t like to read while watching a movie.
Festival director Gráinne Humphreys is very aware of the delicate balance between mainstream films that go on wide release and the rest. ‘Of all the different art forms, you’re conscious that cinema means different things to different people because of the way film straddles both the art and commercial worlds. There are differences between people who see cinema as great art, like for example the masters of the sixties and seventies, and those who enjoy it as a hobby. And I don’t think either group are wrong. I think it’s interesting to talk to people like Thierry [Frémaux, artistic director of the Cannes Film Festival] who say they want to challenge audiences, knowing full well that in the way cinema is marketed, risk-taking is rare because people are spoon fed.’
That awareness on the part of Humphries clearly contributed to the choice of Doubt as the festival opener, a thoughtful film on wide release from 27th February, starring Meryl Streep and Philip Seymour Hoffman. That same night Thierry Frémaux was awarded a festival Lifetime Achievement Volta award in advance of the film. Mr Frémaux was delighted and gracious in accepting the gong, but for the real skinny on at least some of his work at Cannes, the place to be was at the gorgeous Lighthouse cinema in Smithfield the following day for his public interview.
Photo: Thierry Frémaux photographed by Patrick Redmond
Simon Perry: So tell us about your work at Cannes.
Thierry Frémaux: There are four – how do you say? – strengths of Cannes. First of all it is a marketplace where people come and deal in film. Secondly there is Art. It is the place of the auteur, the place where cinema is considered as a piece of art. And because of that, there is an image of Cannes as the place of ‘boring’ film. But then there is celebrity. It is the place where every night at 7 pm there is a meeting on the red carpet. There are the wonderful people with their wonderful clothes… The word star was invented for cinema and is used in Cannes only for people of cinema, to preserve it. Par example, if David Beckham arrives on the red carpet at Cannes, he is not named, because he is not a star of the cinema. And then there is the media. Five hundred journalists attend. And all of that makes Cannes a special place to be.
SP: Yes, there is the alchemy of all of those elements, but what maintains it so specifically at Cannes? Venice and Berlin have the same cachet, so why is Cannes so special?
TF: Well firstly it is not a specifically French festival, but international. There is not often a French Palme d’Or, there was almost twenty-five years between the last two [Under the Sun of Satan directed by Maurice Pialat won the prize in 1987]. And apart from that, Cannes changed with the world – the glamour and presence of Cannes is one reason why. At one time Cannes was not a fan of animation, but we started with Shrek [in 2001]. And because of that, Persepolis was shown in Cannes last year, so Shrek was a Troy horse. It’s cinema. My work is not to say ‘here is the truth’, it’s to say, ‘here is the question’. Cannes reflects what cinema is.
SP: Speaking about that, what is cinema for you, what is its importance?
TF: Well at the time of the festival, there are 40,000 extra people in the city all focused on cinema. There are two or three films in competition per day, and if you don’t go to films all day in Cannes you die. You die. Journalists say to me, ‘What’s the line? What’s the editorial concept of Cannes?’ I say, ‘I don’t know, show me the films.’ Cannes is there to reflect the world of cinema.
SP: What is the essential element that makes a piece of cinema for you as opposed to TV or art?
TF: I ask is it a new form? Or does it go to the tradition of cinema if it’s not new. If a film is a Western then I ask, ‘Is it a good Western?’ There are over 1000 films proposed for the festival and there is only fifty in the final selection. It’s hard to make a good film.
SP: Ireland is relatively young in terms of filmmaking and money is tight, so there tends to be smaller films, but I think they deserve a place in Cannes. It’s of intense interest to many of us where those smaller film should go. Is it the Un Certain Regard section for example?
TF: Well it really depends. I have to see the film. Like for example Quentin Tarantino has announced that he is finishing his film in time for it to be shown at Cannes. And I say to him, ‘That is great’, but I don’t know if it can be shown until I see the film. Every filmmaker thinks that their film is the best film ever made and sometimes, in the case of a great auteur, if they make a bad film for some reason, it is a good thing for their film to be shown at Cannes so that the film will be reviewed and the auteur will come back down to earth.
The Cannes Film Festival runs 13–24 May 2009.
The Lyons Film Festival is due to launch in October ’09.
(Quentin Tarantino’s new film Inglourious Basterds will almost certainly be included in the Cannes Film Festival.)
It was maybe a little more difficult to choose a ‘date’ movie from the feast of cinematic delights on this day of forced romance. The theme of violence and despair in a few of tonight’s selections might have made it clear for Valentine’s Day advocates that Cadillac Records or Confessions of a Shopaholic were the safer bet. For the cynical, unattached, or just mean bastards amongst us, Dot (Nokta) the first of the Turkish cinema season explored the philosophical and often physical torments of crime and punishment. Elsewhere, an interesting parallel to the recently released Valkyrie starring Tom Cruise, was Good, directed by Vicente Amorim and starring Viggo Mortensen. The simple intriguing question posed for audiences, is ‘What turned normal, “good” Germans into people capable of sending millions to the gas chambers during the Second World War?’
Bronson, meanwhile, told the tale of the UK’s most violent prisoner, while Iranian director Majid Majidi took a look at the corruptive forces of capitalism and technology in The Song of Sparrows. Cowards from Spanish writer/directors José Corbacho and Juan Cruz delved into the world of a schoolboy victim of bullying, and the gala screening of the night was The Class. Based on a book written by teacher François Bégaudeau and directed by Laurence Cantet, The Class won the 2008 Palme d’Or and writer/director Laurence Cantet was on hand to answer questions after the film. One of the most striking things about this film is that the real-life writer of the book and teacher Bégaudeau stars as Mr Marin, the teacher of a class of fourteen year olds. The students were ‘discovered’ in a Paris school and the film, which focuses on a year in the life of the classroom, was realised through a series of workshops in which Cantet and Bégaudeau encouraged the students to probe their characters.
The film, currently on release in Ireland in selected cinemas nationwide, is a joy to watch, and whether everyone will take the view that the admittedly very likeable but deliberately provocative Mr Marin is merely employing ‘Socratic’ methods of dialectic as Cantet suggests when he alludes to two of his female students as skanks, is just one of the things that makes this so good!
The day kicked off with a special presentation screening of Gran Torino, 79-year-old Clint Eastwood’s latest film and the one that many have dubbed as his last acting role (although he himself has said it depends on the parts that turn up). With its themes of racial tension and the idea that the time has come for everyone, even old-timers like war-veteran Kowalski (Eastwood), to accept the diversity that has long been the case in the US, Gran Torino neatly taps into the zeitgeist of change and acceptance heralded by Obama’s presidency.
Later that day saw the first Irish film of the festival. Helen, from Dublin-based writer/directors Christine Molloy and Joe Lawlor is an unusual rites of passage story about a girl entering adult life and searching for her own identity through the disappearance of Joy, a young woman that looks just like her.
Presumably ‘dogging’ got its name because it describes to perfection how people meet each other in car parks and, without so much as a sniff, have sex. Director Simon Ellis’s film with the seemingly oxymoronic title of Dogging: A Love Story, was a sell-out.
Back in 2005, just after winning at the Cork Film Festival with her short film Killing the Afternoon, I asked director Margaret Corkery what was next for her. She said, ‘I’m working on writing a feature screenplay and I’m just about to move up to Dublin on Monday in the hope of finding some work, maybe film work. I’m hoping to get my screenplay commissioned but it’s still in the early stages...’ Eamon, Irish film number two at the festival, is the fruit of her labour. The story of a little boy, caught at the centre of a dysfunctional family (is there any other kind?) sees Corkery continue with her singular vision.
The Turkish film festival continued apace with the beautiful and moving Takva, the story of the shy and devout Muharrem who over time finds himself in the role of aggressor as a debt collector for his fundamental church. Director Özer Kiziltan takes this personal, intriguing story by writer/producer Onder Cakar, and brilliantly reflects the tensions that have long existed and continue to blaze between the traditional Muslim values and Western ideals in Turkey. Despite that 99% of the country’s population is Muslim, a secular approach to daily life – eating pork, drinking, sex before marriage – is the norm, and the tug of guilty conscience vs. modern living is brilliantly played out in the life Muharrem.
John Crowley’s controversial Boy A, released two years ago, was screened in advance of his new film Is There Anybody There?, more of which later. There was lots more on offer today, including Lasse Hallström’s My Life As a Dog, (which, can you believe, is 22 years old!) and another Swedish story, This Is Your Life. But the anticipated highlight for me was Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York. Starring Philip Seymour Hoffman as Caden, a theatre director, and Catherine Keener as his artist wife, the film begins as an initially straightforward tale of Woody Allen-esque malaise. She is unhappy in the marriage and bored with his stalled ambition, while he can’t understand what’s going wrong. The moment I was unmistakably reminded that this was a Kaufman film (his directorial debut) is when we see her artworks: teeny tiny, but highly intricate paintings that you need special glasses to see. Her excuse for not going to her husband’s opening night is that she has to ship some of her work, at which point Kaufman treats us to a shot of the tiny paintings sticking out of a box that clearly won’t take long to pack. Funny, funny, funny. From around this point the film veers off into more typically zany Kaufman territory. With Jennifer Jason Leigh, Samantha Morton, Emily Watson and Dianne Wiest all also making appearances, it’s very amusing in places and culminates with the thought-provoking, sobering idea that runs throughout: ‘You realise you are not special. At some point this is everyone’s experience, the specifics hardly matter. Everyone is everyone’. Often deeply enjoyable, the film is also too long and frequently meandering, which, given that it’s a look at life Kaufman-style, might very well be part of the point.
The fourth Irish film of the festival, Our Wonderful Home, written and directed by Ivan Kavanagh, was screened at the IFI. Like Margaret Corkery’s film, the drama occurs within the dynamics of a dysfunctional family and also tackles the big (Big Brother) idea of the true value of wealth and fame. Accounts of the film were generally positive, but unfortunately I had to forgo Our Wonderful Home. Instead it was an early chance to see that rarest of things, an arthouse blockbuster, characterised by the amount of people hailing it as a masterpiece before seeing it. Paolo Sorrentino’s latest film, Il Divo is an unusual biopic about Giulio Andreotti, played brilliantly here by Toni Servillo. Andreotti was Italian Prime Minister three times, Defence Minister twice, and also served as Foreign Minister, and Minister of the Interior. A giant of Italian politics and the Christian Democratic Party, he was frequently accused of corruption and associating with the Mafia. Il Divo is very beautiful to look at, expertly shot and edited on a knife-edge, with a superb soundtrack. Sprinkled with generous helpings of amusing gangster genre references, the narrative suffers from Andreotti’s singular life purpose – he himself said there is little to know except that he lived for politics – which makes for slim cinematic pickings in terms of dramatic tension, other than what Sorrentino has dreamed up here and there. Director Paddy Breathnach was in Cineworld after the screening to interview its Italian writer/director Sorrentino and present the 38-year-old with a Volta Lifetime Achievement Award, all with the help of an interpreter. Breathnach began by asking Sorrentino how his meeting with Andreotti went prior to the making of the film:
Paolo Sorrentino: He advised me not to make the film! We all know in Italy that Andreotti has a grasp of immortality. I spoke with him for three hours and at the end felt as if he had said nothing.
PB: Why did you want to make this film? What was the beginning for you?
PS: I always wanted to make it. I tried to make a short about Andreotti as a child. He has a character that’s very suitable for cinema!
PB: How did you know that Andreotti felt guilty about Moro? [Andreotti is portrayed as conflicted over the fate of Aldo Moro, a former two-time Italian Prime Minister and leader of the Christian Democratic Party, who was kidnapped by the communist Red Brigade in May 1978 and held for two months before being murdered. It is a matter of record that Andreotti and his fellow party members did little or nothing to secure Moro’s release].
PS: Andreotti doesn’t display guilt or sensitivity about his death in reality. I put it in to the film to show a human side rather than a total immoral gangster!
PB: And what about his relationship with his wife? Was that intended to humanise him as well?
PS: No. It wasn’t. It was included to illustrate his personal life, which he never talks about. Although I had no inside information as to what their relationship was really like.
PB: Why did you decide not to shoot this as a straight biopic with a traditional narrative structure?
PS: The initial idea was to make a rock opera about someone who was as far from rock as could be.
PB: And what about the gangster genre influences at the beginning of the film? Do you like gangster films?
PS: Yes. And if possible I would’ve extended the opening sequence for the entire two hours. I love gangster films.
PB: How did you find out that Andreotti has a passion for [the actress] Mary Gassman?
PS: He has said it.
Question from the audience: The soliloquy in the film during which Andreotti talks about the nature of good and evil. Was that truth or fiction?
PS: It was based on what I think; the conclusions I have drawn from examining Andreotti’s life.
Question from the audience: Toni Servillo’s performance seemed to be a mixture of caricature and grotesque. Was that deliberate or just how he played it?
PS: The characterisation was meant to be realistic. The characteristics were taken from his real life behaviour. He has a way of being immobile and expressing himself in quips. He is a sort of caricature of himself.
Question from the audience: Would you make a film about Berlusconi?
PS: No. Andreotti still maintains a certain style that Berlusconi doesn’t have.
Photo: Paolo Sorrentino photographed by Patrick Redmond
Despite hailing from these shores and having made the definitively Irish Intermission, John Crowley’s last two films have been set in England and made largely with British money. Is There Anybody There? is a pleasant enough film about Edward, a young boy growing up in the old folks’ home his parents run, who is determined to see a ghost. The arrival of Clarence (Michael Caine) at the house means a new friend for Edward as the pair – one at the beginning of his life and the other at the end – attempt to work out the ways of the world. Crowley and writer Peter Harness sometimes channel Mike Leigh with this depiction of family life and the everyday concerns of the boredom of marriage and the well-observed mysteries of childhood. But while the acting is excellent all round and the actors certainly seem capable of plumbing the depths, Crowley remains on more superficial About A Boy territory and keeps things light and chirpy, even in the face of death and Alzheimer’s. Director Damien O’Donnell interviewed Crowley afterwards about this latest work and other adventures.
Damien O’Donnell: Your last film was about children as well – [Boy A delved into the much darker and more difficult area of a child murderer released from prison as an adult] why did you want to make this?
John Crowley: I thought it would be funnier to look at getting old through the eyes of a kid.
DO’D: Do you ever find that there’s a big difference in the take on the day and how things turn out in the edit? Do you do a lot of takes?
JC: Well Michael Caine is unapologetic about working for money…He has this joke about somebody saying, ‘Have you seen Jaws 4?’ and his response is, ‘No but I’ve seen the extension on so-and-so actor’s house and it’s very nice!’. So that’s his approach and I suppose, in keeping with that, he wants to get it right on the first take. A bit like Colin Farrell, who, incidentally, also doesn’t do theatre. Personally I wouldn’t do a second take without having a reason.
Question from the audience: You filmed this in England, why not Ireland?
JC: I never really thought about that. The writer is English and he grew up in a nursing home and I was looking for a film with a kid at the centre of it. It felt quite truthful for it to be set in Northern England…
Question from the audience: How was the casting process? Where did you find Bill Milner?
JC: It was just a normal casting call and Bill Milner turned up. His accent was very good and I thought he was very good in Son of Rambow.
DO’D: Your last two films have been about confused boys dealing with the world, is there any connection there?
JC: No. I’ll lay off stories with kids for a while. I did these back to back so there may have been a bit of seepage.
DO’D: And your last film Boy A, that was connected to the Bolger case, wasn’t it? Talk to us about that?
JC: Well the writer knew a boy released from a detention centre and he came out at the same time as that case. I tried to make sure Boy A didn’t become an ‘issues movie’, and I was moved at how much, bizarrely, it was a growing up story. It was impossible to make it and not reference the Bolger case in some way, but we wanted it to find its own reality.
DO’D: You took a sympathetic approach to the central character in Boy A, which was a dangerous topic, especially at the time.
JCL: Yeah, if you get the audience to invest and care and want things to work out [for this boy] and then reveal he’s a child killer… The average viewer is pulled out of their comfort zone when they realise that it’s a child killer they want to give a second chance.
Question from the audience: You set the film in the eighties and I think you captured the period very well…
JC: Thank you. It was the decade I grew up in, it was the time that Margaret Thatcher pronounced that ‘there’s no such thing as society, just individuals’. And I thought a good counterpoint to that idea was an old peoples’ home and the community that that is, and the idea of that community trying to survive in Thatcher’s England.
DO’D: I often have difficulty with a specific part of a movie, do you ever find that?
JC: Beginnings and endings I don’t mind, it’s the middles I find fiendishly difficult!
Photo: John Crowley photographed by Patrick Redmond
Six of the films at this year’s festival were chosen by guests who were invited to pick their favourite European film as part of a celebration of European Cinema. The idea was that the festival organisers asked people ‘whose work we admire’, to select a title and take part in a Q&A discussing the reason for their choice after the film.
The people and their choices were as follows: Radio presenter Zbyszek Zalinski chose Krzysztof Kieslowski’s Three Colours Blue (1993), actor and singer Camille O’Sullivan chose David Lean’s Brief Encounter (1945), Denis Hickie, a former Ireland rugby player chose Wim Wenders’ The American Friend (1977), theatre director Garry Hynes chose Lasse Hallström’s My Life as A Dog (1985), poet Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill chose Marcel Carné’s Les enfants du paradis (1945) and food critic Tom Doorley chose Bruce Robinson’s Withnail & I (1987).
Sports people are not often known for their interest in the arts, how many former rugby players have you heard of, for instance, with a penchant for new German cinema? Here’s one. Having retired as a player a couple of years ago, Denis Hickie has a keen art eye and explained he likes The American Friend because ‘I have a nostalgia for the late seventies and early eighties grime that comes through so well. I love the luxurious colours, the deep reds against the burnt orange. I’m sure lots of you here know a lot more about this film and Wim Wenders than I do, but I just wanted to see it on the big screen, so here it is…’ Good choice – simultaneously annoying, quirky, pompous, but completely engaging as only Wim Wenders can be.
Lots of films by Irish filmmakers today. Stone Pastures, also known as Textures in certain circles is Donagh Coleman’s hour-and-a-quarter-long meditation on a simple way of life about a family of Pashmina goat farmers on the Himalayan plateau of Ladakh.
Cherrybomb was directed by Belfast-based Glenn Leyburn and Lisa Barros D'Sa who, along with DJ/musician David Holmes, make up the production company Canderblinks. Starring Rupert Grint, Robert Sheehan and James Nesbitt and written by Daragh Carville of Middletown fame, it tells the story of teenage angst-ridden love and lust.
Reports were that Niall McKay’s cathartic documentary A Song for Dad was pretty and deeply moving, traversing as it did McKay’s relationship with his father and delving into his mother’s alcoholism and death many years before. But Dorothy Mills, directed by French woman Agnès Merlet, shot in Ireland and featuring a largely Irish cast was the weird wonder of the night. A young girl living in an isolated rural spot is accused of assaulting a baby, which is why psychologist Jane Van Dopp (Dutch actress Carice van Houten) goes to investigate. A strange melodramatic series of events unfold, settling in B-movie heaven somewhere between Sybil and The Wicker Man. The acting is excellent throughout, notably from David Wilmot as ‘the only sane one in the pack’ and relative newcomer to the screen Jenn Murray who displays amazing range and depth of emotion as the, how shall I put it, psychologically challenged demon of the piece. 23-year-old Murray will star in the BBC production of The Day of the Triffids alongside Vanessa Redgrave and Jason Priestley later this year.
Today Is Better Than Two Tomorrows is Irish director Anna Rodgers’ rites of passage story about two boys moving from innocence to adulthood in a remote Buddhist village in Laos. Later, on another screen, it’s The Daisy Chain and you have to wonder: what is it with Irish films and messed-up little girls? From director Aisling Walsh (Song for a Raggy Boy), like Dorothy Mills, The Daisy Chain is set in a remote Irish village and pivots on the actions of a small unusual girl. This time the diminutive female baddie is thought to be a bad fairy by some of the locals. Great performances from the parents of the piece, Samantha Morton and Steven Mackintosh (who has mastered his Irish accent since Small Engine Repair) keep you watching. RTÉ’s Online Entertainment Correspondent Tara Loughrey Grant interviewed Aisling Walsh after the film. Producers Tristan Lynch, Dominic Wright and writer Lauren Mackenzie were also in attendance.
Tara Loughrey Grant: People often say ‘never work with animals or children.’ What was it like working with ‘Daisy’?
Aisling Walsh: It’s very easy when you find the right child like Mhairi [Anderson]. She had never acted before and it’s a big role for a child who came from Glasgow to Ireland.
TLG: Do you ever look back on your own work? Have you watched Song for a Raggy Boy since you made it, and maybe wished it was different?
AW: I saw it in France last year for the first time in four years. It’s something you forget.
TLG: You wrote Song for a Raggy Boy yourself. How did you find it working with a writer this time?
AW: Well, there are things one has to overcome. The first budget was €20m so we had to scale that down and eventually we found a way. And as I’m sure you can tell, Samantha Morton was actually four weeks away from having a baby towards the end of the film, she had to be insured by the branch of Lloyds that insures soldiers going into Iraq! So we adapted the script to fit Sam’s pregnancy…
Question from the audience: What was the overall budget in the end?
AW: Somewhere around the €3m mark.
TLG: Where did you find ‘Daisy’?
AW: We were originally going to make the film in Scotland and Northern Ireland and so we found Daisy at that time through casting directors who went into schools in those areas.
Question from the audience: Do you believe in changelings?
Tristan Orpen Lynch: Someone in the audience asked us that at another screenings and she [gesturing to Aisling Walsh] said no, and I said yes.
Question from the audience: Some of the film is quite difficult to watch, did the role have any effect on Mhairi?
AW: No we just did it scene by scene. Kids love dressing up, and she had incredible concentration, she was with us for six weeks.
Question from the audience: Where did you get that story from, was it based on anything in particular?
Lauren McKenzie: No it wasn’t based on any one tale, changeling stories are popular throughout Europe.
Question from the audience: There were references to autism throughout the film in terms of an explanation for Daisy’s condition. Why did you choose that? And what sort of research did you do for it?
LMK: I did a lot of research on autism. I wanted to suggest that she’s not autistic, but that her condition could be as a result of abuse. Autism and the changeling myths are connected… There’s an idea of the autistic savant as magical in that sense, and feared because of that. The ‘faery’ myths are about kids who have the talents of adults.
TLG: Aisling, you went to Dun Laoghaire and studied Fine Art, how does that work as a way into film?
AW: Art school teaches you about composition and colour – I became a filmmaker instead of a painter of sculptor.
Much has been said and written already about The Secret of Kells, the Irish animation telling the story behind the creation of the Book of Kells. Featuring the voices of Brendan Gleeson and Mick Lally and helmed by Kilkenny man Tomm Moore with the team from Cartoon Saloon, the film is currently on release and is well worth seeing. Another hot topic on the closing night was the surprise film, which turned out to be Hamlet 2 starring Steve Coogan as a high-school drama teacher whose curriculum is comprised of adapting Hollywood movies for the stage.
And the final word goes to….
Festival director, Gráinne Humphreys.
Sheena Sweeney: When did you start work on the 2009 festival?
Gráinne Humphreys: About two minutes after last year’s finished! Actually, I think plots for some of the things like the Turkish season were already in place. I see it as a rolling thing, you see things at it that make you go ‘wow’. I’m constantly surprised at things you see at festivals that don’t get picked up. I’m highly amused The Song of Sparrows, the Iranian film, hasn’t been picked up by Artificial Eye.
SS: What do you start with?
GH: This year we did a couple of things I really liked. We did the hospital screenings – screenings of the Liam Clancy documentary in hospitals across the city and I really liked that. We’re trying to get Dublin City Council and other semi state bodies involved to try and find a connection, in more than an administrative traffic element, like a Lord Mayor’s Gala or something like that, to create a real sense of them being partners. In terms of programming, Tribeca is the first place I’ll look and from then on it’s a run to Cannes and that’s when it all kicks off in terms of titles. But having said that I was in Budapest last year which is where I saw Let the Right One In [the brilliant Swedish vampire movie] so you’re never sure where you’ll see something.
SS: How do you come to develop elements like The Turkish programme?
GH: It’s really the fact that we’re always seeing French, German, Italian and Spanish film and yet we’re part of a greater land mass called Europe. And I’m very curious about that, and curious about what other work is being made. I went to Turkey this year and it’s that sense of otherness that you see, and that was one of the reasons.
SS: Is that sense of curiosity on your part a driving force in the selection process?
GH: I think it’s curiosity and optimism. There’s always the sense that the next film you’re going to see is going to be fantastic. You have to approach every filmmaker or every film with a sense that this is the one that’s going to change the way you look at cinema. That doesn’t always happen, but the minute you become cynical I don’t know how you’d be able to keep going.
SS: What are film festivals about as far as you’re concerned?
GH: Challenging people is a reason to have a festival, but it’s not the only one. But at the same time Marley & Me [screened on the closing day of the festival] is not going to challenge anyone’s perceptions. Cinema is a broad church – though church is the wrong word – but it’s pretty much about audience development in terms of programming. You know there’ll be people who are going to be interested in international world cinema and then there’ll be people who are going to be intimidated by that. So you’re trying to bring in the once-a-month cinema-goer, because they’re as valid as the once-off artistic cinema goers and it’s a form of snobbery to say that they’re not.
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