Ballerina Ballroom Film Festival

9 Aug 2008 in Festival, Film, Highland

Pure Cinephilia Comes To Nairn

ALLAN HUNTER sets the scene for a film festival where love of cinema is the only motivating factor

LIKE EVERY arts organisation in the land, film festivals have to keep an eye on the bottom line. Stars are expensive but essential if you want to win over the media. Distributors always have special demands, there is fierce competition to host premieres and sponsorship never comes without strings. It often feels as if the quality of the films is the last thing on anyone’s mind.

That will certainly not be the case with the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema Of Dreams festival in Nairn later this month, which is making the desires of the dedicated film buff its very top priority. “There will be no champagne receptions, absolutely not, no opening addresses and no politicians,” boasts filmmaker and journalist Mark Cousins, one of the Festival’s organisers. “It will be purely triple-distilled cinephilia.”

Cousins has collaborated with Oscar-winning actress and Nairn resident Tilda Swinton to create an event that is free from commercial pressures and corporate demands. More of an old-fashioned happening than a traditional Festival, it will screen familiar favourites like Singin’ In The Rain, All About Eve and I Know Where I’m Going alongside such foreign-language classics as Fellini’s 8 1/2 and genuine rarities like the 1932 Ozu film I Was Born, But…, featuring a brand new score by composer Simon Fisher Turner.

The Ballerina event may be an act of impetuous indulgence, but it also has a serious aim of working to encourage a greater appreciation of film among young audiences

The entire ethos of the event is defined by passion and enthusiasm. “This is a happening inspired entirely by a love of film. We have nothing to sell, no industry to serve, no studios to placate,” explained Swinton in a recent interview.

“We wanted the Festival to serve as a reminder that cinema exists outside of the multiplex, that going to the pictures is more than just a question of checking into the latest oversold commodity, that having a favourite film, like discovering a new one, is part of life’s true riches, at whatever age you discover it, for whatever reason, and that treasure lasts forever.”

The Ballerina event has received financial support from HI~Arts (tapadh leibh), but has otherwise been funded by Tilda Swinton herself. Swinton has rented the Ballerina Ballroom, a former bingo hall in Nairn High Street that was once the kind of venue that attracted bands like The Who, Cream and Pink Floyd.

Swinton’s architect friend Colin Cawdor has overseen the re-fit of the building. Bjorn Koll, the managing director of Berlin’s Salzberger and Co, is supplying state of the art digital projection equipment and Claire Halleran has the task of adding a little magic to the look and design of the building’s interior.

A whole range of top professionals have given their services to a venture Swinton has described as a piece of holiday whimsy. Cousins has given a further insight into the ethos of the event when he noted it would be a ” festival of beanbags on the floor, that would run for 8-12 days, that would be a 6-out-of-ten on the grunge scale, that would serve home-made cakes and fish finger sandwiches, whose tickets would be £3/£2 and that would transform the Ballerina into something like a ghost train.”

The Ballerina event may be an act of impetuous indulgence, but it also has a serious aim of working to encourage a greater appreciation of film among young audiences. People will happily go to a gallery to see an exhibition of old paintings or attend a concert of old music but there is still a resistance in some quarters to seeing any movies that are not the latest Hollywood blockbusters.

Terrestrial television now devotes little screen time to vintage fare and even less to foreign language films, which means the chance to see those kind of films on a cinema screen with an audience of fellow enthusiasts is one to be grabbed. Apart from screening Fellini’s 8 1/2, the festival will run for 8 1/2 days, and Swinton is keen to keep the theme running by establishing an 8 1/2 Foundation that would continue the good work of spreading an interest in cinema amongst an eager young audience.

Swinton won an Oscar earlier this year for her role in Michael Clayton opposite George Clooney and has since been reunited with Clooney in the new Coen Brothers comedy Burn After Reading, which will be released in September. She has reached a point in her career where she is in constant demand and has the kind of connections that will ensure the Cinema Of Dreams some powerful allies in the film world.

Director Joel Coen has personally chosen two of the titles in the programme; the toe-tapping 1930s musical Dames with Dick Powell and Ruby Keeler and High And Low from 1963, an unusual Akira Kurosawa thriller in which the Japanese master adapts an Ed McBain novel in which a businessman’s greatest financial triumph occurs at the moment his son is kidnapped.

A ransom is demanded but the tycoon soon discovers that the wrong boy has been snatched and the film becomes a fascinating mixture of moral dilemmas and methodical manhunt. Toshiro Mifune stars. As the funder and inspiring force behind the Cinema Of Dreams, Swinton can be forgiven for ensuring that the programme also includes her favourite film.

It is the opening night presentation and is Peter Ibbetson, an ethereal salute to the power of love and the way it can conquer all obstacles including separation, injustice and even the trifling matter of mortality. Gary Cooper and Ann Harding star in a 1935 production that is all too rarely shown. The film’s return to the big screen, backed by the tender love of Swinton’s patronage is the very reason the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema Of Dreams exists and why it might just become an annual event.

The Ballerina Ballroom Cinema Of Dreams runs from August 15 to 23 at the Ballerina Ballroom, 95 High Street, Nairn, IV12 4DB. Further information and advance tickets are available from their website (see below) or from the Nairn Bookshop.