Home Truths and Distant Worlds

MATT LLOYD explains the thinking behind the programme for the 4th Inverness Film Festival
 

SIXTY YEARS ago there were only three film festivals in the world – Cannes, Venice and Edinburgh. Now the UK alone boasts around two hundred. A few are internationally recognized star-fests, some cater for specific tastes – French cinema, for example, or horror films – whilst others provide the only non-mainstream programming a particular region can offer.

There is considerable competition between festivals for the best films, so the challenge for any programmer is to carve out a unique festival identity, whilst still attracting a wide audience.

It was with this in mind that Paul Taylor, Eden Court’s cinema programmer, and I approached our first Inverness Film Festival programme. As a young festival – this will be its fourth year – we felt it was time Inverness declared its intentions in an informal manifesto.
 
Thanks to Eden Court’s regular, excellent film programme, there was no obligation to show specific titles which otherwise wouldn’t reach the city. At the same time, we had no desire to come up with something so esoteric that it would only appeal to a tiny minority.

So we settled on two distinct but complementary themes – Scottish, particularly Highland, cinema, and an international programme entitled ‘Distant Worlds’.

Ultimately, we want Inverness Film Festival to offer a programme unlike any other in the UK

As the UK’s most northerly film festival, we felt Inverness’s programme should reflect the values of the Highlands, whether through revisiting classic local films, or through selecting international titles set in remote and dramatic locations, in which ancestry and storytelling are to the fore.

Films from varied and distant worlds demonstrate a common sense of humanity, which is, after all, the most important message cinema can offer.

Amongst the Scottish films on offer is the Scottish premiere of The Last King of Scotland. Directed by Oscar winning Kevin MacDonald (One Day in September, Touching the Void) this is an extraordinary imagining of a young Scottish doctor seduced by the charisma of the Ugandan dictator Idi Amin.
 
Skye-born director Douglas MacKinnon will introduce his film The Flying Scotsman as the closing night gala. Starring Johnny Lee Miller and Brian Cox, the film is a fantastic recreation of Scottish cyclist Graeme Obree’s fight against depression and institutional snobbery.

The Island Tapes is a live performance of new musical scores to silent black and white films of life on Scottish islands in the 1920s and 30s. From the archives, we chose a Hebridean double-bill of Play Me Something (1989), starring John Berger and Tilda Swinton, and the rarely seen dark melodrama The Brothers (1947), a sort of dark riposte to I Know Where I’m Going, which features probably the only death by gull and herring in cinema history.

The ‘Distant Worlds’ programme features films set in extreme environments and so-called peripheral cultures, and includes the breathtakingly beautiful Inuit film The Journals of Knud Rasmussen, the first ever film in an Aboriginal language, the wonderful and funny Ten Canoes, and the astonishingly-titled 37 Uses for a Dead Sheep, an off-beat documentary following the Pamir Kirghiz tribe of Central Asia.

These are three new films in which marginalised, indigenous communities tell their stories, the cast of each film playing their own grandparents.

Other treats include the Scottish premiere of Alejandro González Iñárritu’s Babel, starring Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett, and the UK premiere of Oliver Parker’s Fade to Black, starring Danny Houston as Orson Welles. And we have late night screenings, of the sultry noir thriller Hollywoodland and the hilarious Special, about an ordinary schmo who believes he has superhuman powers.

Highland filmmaking of the future is represented by the premiere screening of the five films made by local first-timers through the Digital Eden project.

Alongside the screening, we are running a series of masterclasses and workshops to encourage Highland filmmakers to develop their skills and experience.

Glasgow Media Access Centre will be launching their nationwide short film funding schemes Cineworks and Digicult, whilst industry professionals will be offering their expertise on submitting scripts for funding, and on the role of the editor. Over the two weekends following the festival, production company Brocken Spectre is running the nationally-recognised Writer’s Factory Introduction to Screenwriting Course.

So, that manifesto I mentioned… ultimately, we want Inverness Film Festival to offer a programme unlike any other in the UK. We want the festival to be a forum for filmmakers and film-lovers from the city and beyond. We want to see more indigenous filmmaking activity from the authentic voices of the Highlands. And we want to question just how different from us those Distant Worlds really are.

Matt Lloyd is the co-director of the Inverness Film Festival. The festival runs from 9-12 November 2006.

© Matt Lloyd, 2006

Links

• Inverness Film Festival