ICO Cultural Exhibition, Day 3

Our third day on the course brought an area that perhaps is my weakest link: short, archive and moving image films. I’m a feature guy. We’ve shown some of these things in the past at the Dukes, mostly because of our relationship with the Screen Archive South East. Frank Gray, the archive director and also co-director of our Cinecity Film Festival, was here today to talk – and as always he was engaging and very non-didactic. Sue Porter, from the Moving Image Archive for Central England, made the somewhat arguable claim that “archive film has never been sexier”.

Then followed perhaps the juiciest bit of the day: Sandra Hebron, the director of the London Film Festival, pulled the curtain on how the UK’s largest international film festival is put together. What I didn’t realize is how much the LFF relies on sponsorship money: 50% of its budget. She then described the ‘arduous’ task of traveling the world’s best film festivals scouting for films all year long. The feeling in the room was not one I would describe as pity. One of the most interesting things she said was that the UK culture was undergoing a ‘festivalisation’, not just in film, but literature, music and art.

Mark Cosgrove from Watershed joined the discussion halfway through and described how the Encounters Short Film Festival was created and where it stands now. He resents the thematisation of programming and described his approach as ‘pix n’mix”.

We were then moved into the basement for a talk with Adam Pugh, former director of the AURORA animation festival in Norwich who derisorily described Cinema City as ‘conventional’ which didn’t impress a City Screen man like me. Straight afterwards we were ushered into NFT3 for a screening of short films. Apart from the first two films, The Anthem by Apichatpong Weerasethakul and Guest of Honor by Miguel Calderon, every single one of the films confirmed all my prejudices about artist moving image and short films.

Things got practical after that: we’ve been broken up into groups and have some workshop homework to do. That’s always the best part about any course like this because you get to know your cohort and become animated and inspired.

Tomorrow it’s all about marketing and PR. Stay tuned!

Culural Exhibition, Day 2

Our second day kicked off with one of my main areas of interest: audience development. David Sin walked us through the basics, and I took advantage and tried to gather as much knowledge as I could in advance of the new challenges we’ll be facing in Stratford. He underlined the importance of market research and audience surveys, which I think should be at the heart of any venue’s work. Being audience-led is key.

Gaylene Gould (pictured) joined us for a talk on Cultural Diversity, a topic that makes most people’s eyes roll because it has become synonymous with public policy talk, and often is not rooted in real work and/or results. But Gaylene brought a fresh and smart approach which made us gasp and laugh in equal measures. “Film, of all art forms, I find is the most bigoted and the most racist.” She said, right before I asked how to connect with black audiences in East London. She gave me some top notch pointers. “For starters, if you’re whole team looks like you, you’re in trouble.” Noted.

Then we had very interesting panels on accessing disabled audiences, young people and children. Cathy Poole from the Curzon in Clevedon showed us an amusing home video which revealed that they have the same exact ancient ticket machine (AUTOMATIC) that we have! This session also gave us one of my favorite quotes of the day, courtesy of Martin Grund from Leeds Young People’s Festival: “you wouldn’t expect the world to only read books from one city in one country” on Hollywood’s film dominance.

The last session for the day was the distributor’s perspective: Dave Jarmain from Universal (my favorite major), Matt Smith from Lionsgate and Colin Burch from Verve. They outlined their business models and then we got on to the juicy stuff: distributors versus exhibitors. While they bemoaned the existence of windows, I pointed out that flexibility is needed both ways, specially when asking for all shows for weeks at a time. As always when you pit these two groups together, it gets fun, tense and “a little passive aggressive” as another trainee mentioned.

We finished off with a tour of the Roxy Bar and Screen near Bourough Market, an innovative and cool venue which, as it names suggests, is a bar first and a screen second. The owner and manager Phil Wood was a gracious host and apparently is a reader of this blog. Hi Phil!

Tomorrow, on Cultural Exhibition: Programming shorts, archive, festivals, moving image…

ICO Cultural Exhibition Course, Day 1

Today was the beginning of the Independent Cinema Office’s Cultural Exhibition Course, held at the BFI Southbank. It runs till Friday, and I’ll be tweeting (via @splendorcinema) and blogging about it.

After a basic outline of the ins and outs of exhibition and distribution from the ICO’s David Sin (who was best when he went off script and told us the implications of the European Court case of pub landlady versus Sky), we had an interesting talk from Julie Pierce, Head of Programme Planning for the BFI.

As a massive fan of the BFI’s retrospectives and seasons, it was fascinating to hear how they put the programme together, with some of the seasons (like Godard) taking up to two years to research and book. They have 9 programmers for 4 screens, which is a luxurious amount of staff, and which allows them to put on such magnificent films.

Then we had an amusing presentation from Richard Boyd, Technical Manager at the BFI, who again, amazed us with the ridiculous amount of resources this venerable institution (rightly) has: £200,000 spent recently on two film projectors, and weekly testing of all equipment. Interesting to hear that the BFI Southbank has the only public license in the UK to screen nitrate film, a very flammable (and familiar to anyone who’s seen Tarantino’s Inglorious Basterds) and dangerous substance that hasn’t been used in film prints for 60 years.

After some lunch, former Dukes programmer and friend Jason Wood (now head of programming at Curzon) joined Tracey Hyde from Saffron Screen for a panel on programming. Jason is always a funny, engaging speaker, and he knows his stuff. He outlines some of the ambitious plans Curzon has in store: putting other distributor’s films on their On Demand service, programming the Cornerhouse in Manchester, opening new Curzon sites in University towns across the UK, and also their recent acquisitions in Cannes: Artificial Eye (Curzon’s sister company) will be distributing the Von Trier, the Dardennes, the Kaurismaki, and We Need to Talk About Kevin. That’s an impressive lineup.

Some of Jason’s pearls of wisdom for the day: “There’s a danger that cinema will become alternative content”. And “A Judi Dench film means an onslaught of comfortable shoes” and when talking about the danger of losing young audiences to On Demand: “ There’s no audience to be lost, cause they’re not there”.

We finished the day with an interesting panel on non-theatrical exhibition, which included the Flatpack Festival, the ‘open-source’ Star and Shadow venue in Newcastle and the Slough Film Society (which is apparently filled with Communists!).

Next, on Cultural Exhibition: Audience Development. Cutural Diversity, Programming for children and the distributor’s perspective!

Eastbound and Up

Last week I was offered a new position as Business Development Manager at the Stratford Picturehouse in East London. I'll be working there three days a week, retaining my General Manager job at the Dukes.

It's an exciting new challenge, one I have been waiting for. I love the Duke of York's Picturehouse and I remain devoted to its success, but it's time to take on new ventures, and develop as a manager.

The Stratford Picturehouse opened in August 1997, and is a very interesting purpose-built building which now sits right next door to the 2012 Olympic Site. My job is help build new audiences and revenues for the cinema, which faces some new competition.

My entries on this blog will become even less frequent, and I'll probably take a break from it until I attend the Pula and Sarajevo Film Festival in July. Until then, happy moviegoing!

Terrence Malick Pantheon

A couple of days back Rob and I sat down to record one of our now legendary Pantheon podcasts, where we look at one single director that we both love and place them in the pantheon of all time greats. That was an easy task with Terrence Malick, whom I consider one of the all-time and living best directors out there. Rob was less familiar with his work, but quickly caught up and shared (most) of my enthusiasm. We also had a lot of speculation and comments on the ongoing drama with the release of TREE OF LIFE, hopefully coming to a cinema near you soon. But why read about it here in boring words and stuff, when you can listen to it on our podcast:

Splendor Cinema Podcast 55: Terrence Malick

The Newer, Slimmer Splendor

I've decided to stop posting the box office figures on Monday. I started posting them a couple of years ago, and at that time no one else posted the Top 10 on a Monday morning. About a year ago, Charles Gant started his really well written column in the Guardian where he breaks down the week's releases by numbers on Tuesdays. Now IMDB.co.uk also posts the figures on a Monday, so the purpose of the posts (to provide industry with a top 10 with some analysis) is being covered by others.

In fact, my whole relationship to this blog has changed recently as my workload increases. I post a lot less, and I am sorry for those regular readers. I will still post reports from Festivals, and when something in the industry happens that grabs my attention you will hear from me.

I spend a lot more time on Twitter these days, posting from the cinema's account: @Dukeofyorks and my own: @splendorcinema. The podcast is still going strong, now 53 episodes in, and you can download that on iTunes or at the Picturehouse website.

Hasta pronto!

Toulouse Roundup

Last week I attended the Cine Latino Film Festival in Toulouse, France. It's an annual showcase of the best in Latin American cinema, one of the biggest in the world. I attended as a guest of the CINEMA EN CONSTRUCCION strand, which is a competition for unifinished films looking for post-production money.

The Festival is very relaxed, laid back, and the beer is cheap. The anti-Cannes, if you will. Lots of directors from Latin America fly in and the atmosphere is positively latino. Last year I attended as part of the CINE SIN FRONTERAS (now CINEMALAB) programme, with the CINE ESTELI project.

I saw seven films in two days, including opener from Argentina ROMPECABEZAS, a tired collection of cliches about a woman who obsesses over puzzles (the title of the film). Not a great beginning. This was a finished film which competed the year before for the CONSTRUCCION prize.

Another finished film I saw was LAS MARIMBAS DEL INFIERNO, from Guatemala, which can only be described as Central America's answer to ANVIL, about a poor marimba player who joins a heavy metal band. This is one of the best films I have seen all year: moving, hilarious, beautifully shot. A real original crowd pleaser, and made in the docu-drama style of ALAMAR.



I won't bore you with the collection of unfinished films because it's not really fair to review something which doesn't even have a sound design, but suffice to say, most were done in the 'slow cinema' style that has completely taken over all festivals worldwide, and they bored me to death. Except one: BONSAI, a Chilean film from Cristian Jimenez (pictured), a director from Valdivia (where I was last year), also produced by Bruno Bettati, a friend and director of the Valdivia Festival. BONSAI, as I tweeted, was like 500 DAYS OF SUMMER with a PhD in Proust. As the director himself sais before the screening, it's a film about love, books and plants. It's also gorgeously shot (in Valdivia and Santiago), well acted, cleverly written and genuinely erudite in its use of literary references (a cat is called Gogol). It should be a festival hit and might even be a minor commercial success in selected territories. This film won the Best Film Prize at the Construccion competition, which ensures its post-production and distribution in France (TONY MANERO was a previous winner).