Blog: Director Alice Lyon’s Experience at the Edinburgh International Film Festival
Alice Lyons is the director and co-writer of the short animated film THE POLISH LANGUAGE, which was officially selected for screening at the Edinburgh International Film Festival. This is her blog of her experience of having a film screening at one of the top film festivals in Europe.
Sunday 20th June
I flew from Dublin, dumped my suitcase in my hotel, and rushed into the delegate centre in Bread Street to collect my pass before the desk closed. Then, in the festival bar, I sank into a squishy scarlet sofa and started to make my way through all the festival info.
Before long, a black cloth-covered table and mics were dragged smack next to me, and thus began a Festival Dialogue Event called The Bigelow Effect with Birds Eye View. What timing! It was the only one I'd mentally noted in my pre-festival scan of the industry events, and I didn't have to even try to get there; it just materialised in front of me.
It was a fantastic discussion, gathering momentum and listeners as it went on, having a packed house by the time it ended. Birds Eye View are a London based organisation supporting international women filmmakers. Yesterday's panel consisted of three remarkably articulate and candid filmmakers: Debra Granik (Winter's Bone), Kit Hui (Fog) and Stephanie Argy (The Red Machine), all with features in the festival and all, as it happens, having cut their teeth in film in my hometown on New York City. The moderator from Birds Eye (whose name I didn't catch) started with statistics: in 2010, a woman director won a BAFTA for best animated short, Kathryn Bigelow was the first won the first ever Oscar for Best Director, and at Cannes this year there was not one female director up for an award in competition--not very promising statistics on which to pose the panel's central question, Is there a Bigelow effect in movie making?
I'm not sure the panel answered that question directly either way, but it was a rich and nuanced discussion nevertheless.
It is always so great to hear other people's stories (and Story is the sacred mantra of the contemporary film industry if my first two days at EIFF are anything to go by), and the panelists each told of their early days and how they got into making films. Granik and Hui both went to film school (NYU and Columbia, respectively) and Argy educated herself through journalism and writing about film and film technique, with close connections with the Amercian Society of Cinematographers (ASC) and American Cinematographer magazine.
All three spoke of the importance of certain mentors in their early filmmaking lives. I think Debra Granik really kicked off the discussion when, after the moderator had mentioned a few more statistics about women in film, Granik said that listening to her all she could think of was,' You speak of film commissions, what commissions?' Nobody commissions films in the States--it's all driven by private industry. She said that looking for funding support for her projects was 'Talking to Difficult Dudes with a Lot of Money who just feel that they will 'lose their shirts' on the films I'm interested in making.' (These quotes are paraphrased from my notes by the way, so don't quote me!)
Granik's feature, Winter's Bone (which was very warmly received in its first public screening in Filmhouse last night and which features some amazing performances from non-actors who live in the rural Ozark Region of the Central US--won best feature and best screenplay at Sundance) has a female lead who plays a 17 year old girl fighting to keep her family intact as the community around her disintegrate because of crystal meth abuse. She said, 'The stories I'm interested in telling are deemed not commercial.' And that there is censorship by American film financers by not wanting to fund films that feature poor people.
I love the moment (we all know when it happens) when a panel discussion starts to catch fire...you can see the audience wake up and lean forward and the other panelists start nodding their heads. You can almost see the thoughts filling up inside their heads. Kit Hui jumped in. Hui was born in Hong Kong and her feature is set there (I just saw it a few hours ago: a beautiful script--a study of a lost person, a man whose memory is gone. Unformulaic, truthful and full of complex, subtle emotion.) Hui agreed that the movie industry in general is profit driven and that Hong Kong's is extremely commercial. She said that the funding is secured by sitting down with the right people and drinking until the late hours. She said that wasn't her style of doing business, but that when she got the ear of the funders, the response often was, 'What no guns? No Kung-Fu fighting?' It took her over two years to get funding for this, her first feature.
Stephanie Argy said that she was glad when Katheryn Bigelow won the BAFTAs and Oscar for the Hurt Locker, especially for a film with content that isn't seen as 'women's' content--though that notion was duly de-constructed here.
The three women all thought that the rising number of women producers was a good thing and that would contribute to opening up the film world in general to a greater variety of stories and approaches, less focused on the bottom line, which I thought was interesting. I wonder if that is true? I'd like to have delved further into that idea. They seemed to agree that it would be through 'infiltration' of the industry from within that things would begin to change. They all talked about having experienced good gender cooperation in the team nature of the film making process.
The final question put to them was did they have any tips for women directors. Kit Hui said to hold onto your belief in the project, no matter what. She said that in Hong Kong, she had experienced older males on set asking 'Are you sure you want to put that light here? Are you sure you want to do that?', which she saw as potentially undermining and indicative of those person's lack of confidence in having a female (young at that) at the helm. She also told of being at a festival where the people in charge were waiting for the director of the film (hers) to appear, when she was standing right there with them. She said she felt they were waiting for an Asian man to appear--her name Kit, being sort of gender neutral!
Granik picked up on the language thing and said she had to watch out when on set not to thank people too much or say she was sorry too much--all habits she felt were not leader-like... Not that the opposite was any sort of model for best practice. Granik conjured the image--still a romantic one for a segment of the industry-- of the bad boy genius tyrannically barking orders through a megaphone at his underlings. She said the team experiences she has had (and the others agreed) debunked that image and all agreed that the heart of filmmaking is collaborative.
Argy said that no matter how great your team is, being a director can be lonely at times because the decisions fall to you alone. She said this is where the belief in the project was the glue that held you and it together.
It was a really meaty first event--augers well for the rest of the week.
Monday 21st June
Because I write poems and make them into visual art installations or films as well as publishing them in books, I am always moving among various 'worlds': gallery and museum openings in the visual art world or poetry festivals in the literary end of things or, today, a film festival.
It's fascinating to move in and out of these worlds, to see where they intersect and overlap (mostly they do this) and where they are decidely particular. What's inherent in film is the extraordinary experience of being able as a maker also to be part of the fabric of the audience as they see your work for presumably the first time. You can't dive inside the pages of a book and look up at your reader as their eyes move across your words and try to decipher if your work is having any impact. (Though it would be fun, wouldn't it?) And you can't get between a painting or photograph or installation in a gallery (though moving image work and the cinema-in-gallery context is blurring this boundary now) and look back into the eyes of the viewer to see what's happening.
But as you and your fellow audience members are all turned toward the screen where your own work is projected, there's a sense of sharing the experience of seeing that is particular to film. You as maker get to be audience and you also get a feel for the audience's response being plunked in the midst of them. I like this about film--there's an honesty to it, which when you 'have them', is exhilarating and when you don't, makes your skin crawl. And it's up to you to figure out what to do, if anything, with that knowledge.
I was thinking about that as I sat in the public screening of our film on Monday. It was a sold out audience at Filmhouse, and a very attentive and generous one, so it was a piece of cake to sit there. (Well, relatively. I always see the things I'd like to change or do differently in the next film). There was warm applause at the end of each film and they laughed in all the appropriate places in what was a really lovely programme of animation. I found something laudable in each of the films shown and was delighted to see ours up there in that company. You can find the individual titles in the programme at http://www.edfilmfest.org.uk/whats-on?src=strandlink§ion=Animation
But I think what I'm trying to tease out here is less the experience of gauging the reaction of the audience when attending your own screening (though that's interesting in itself)--it's more the rare opportunity to cross over the line from the making side of things to the viewing side that I find so amazing about film. It's as if cinema allows you to leave yourself as maker behind when you are all facing that bright screen. You get to join the fabric of the audience.
In my next entry I'll tell you about the Black Box programme of films that I'm attending here.
Tuesday 22nd June
Last night at the Short Film Awards party in the penthouse at the Mercure Hotel (Edinburgh--stunning in any weather-- was glittering in sunshine) I had a glass of wine and a great chat with animator Maria Mouet, from Moscow, who is here with her film A Not So Sad Story. Maria has made over 20 animated films and is an expert puppeteer. She even brought along one of her cast, which she produced from her handbag, wrapped in a little plastic bag. All fabric and thread, he was.
It's fantastic to meet an animator who is a master craftswoman. Last year Mouet chaired the selection committee of the famous KROK animation festival, the one that happens on a boat cruising through Russia and the Ukraine by turns, a floating mecca for animation. Puppet animation is her life's work, her passion. Her eyes shine, a bit like Edinburgh, when she talks about it.
We talked too of the beautiful animated/live action feature, A Room and a Half, by the accomplished animation director Andrey Khrzhanovskiy, which recently had a run in Dublin. It's a fictionalised account of exiled Russian poet Joseph Brodsky's return to his native city of St. Petersburg and, judging from people in both the poetry and the animation worlds whom I talked to about it, it was was equally loved for its literary and filmic qualities. Brodsky was a force of nature as a poet and a man--I was reading one of his essays on exile today in the wonderful Scottish Poetry Library in Canongate (Ireland deserves such a place for itself).
In addition to Khrzhanovsky's film, read Seamus Heaney's elegy for Brodsky ('Audenesque--In Memory of Joseph Brodsky', in his collection Electric Light) to get a sense of the man. Heaney likens Brodsky to a car with the accelarator to the floor when he read his poems aloud. A bittersweet poem for a loved friend. I digress.
Maria Mouet was off to Aberdeenshire today, taking the opportunity to visit the place where her great grandfather came from. He was Mowat from a very small town, she couldn't recall the name. Another emigrant. Another story.
Thursday 24th June
The Black Box programme is Edinburgh's experimental film strand. They have a large programme of short works and this year, there were two features in the strand as well. This morning I watched Sarah Turner's 118 minute film Perestroika. It is a really accomplished piece and an example of the continued blurring of the boundary between fine art moving image work and narrative documentary. Turner's voice takes us through her experience of reconstructing a journey to Lake Baikal in Siberia, where she had gone 20 years earlier with a friend who died shortly after. Turner is also trying, through awakening memory, to recover something of herself in what is a turbulent, difficult present tense. She says at one point she fears the project will betray her own incoherence.The subtext is certainly that she is seeking something lost, seeking greater wholeness. There is mention of a biking accident, and we are left to wonder how much of her difficulty with memory is due to the pain of losing her friend or to the aftermath of the accident. Or both. It's never made explicit.
Turner blends 2007 digital footage with 1987 celluloid, the images and the soundtracks from both time frames overlapping and splicing in ways that feels so true to thought and memory. Most of the film goes by in a mesmerising, syncopated and decidely horizontal march East. And there are moments of gorgeous camera work. There's a claustrophobic, sometimes self-obsessed feeling to the film--you can't help but think of the countless grim journeys made to the Gulags on that same route--but there is so much complexity and intensity in the narrative, that you can forgive her narrow focus.
Another gorgeous documentary (not in the Black Box programme, but in the Document strand), this time set on the docks of Genoa, is La Bocca del Lupo (The Mouth of the Wolf). I've just come out of seeing it this evening. It's full of rich, saturated colours and is as much about nostalgia and the history of that port city as it is a love story between two broken and beautifully in love people, Enzo and Mary. The director Pietro Marcello was here for a Q and A post-screening.
I couldn't help but think of Terence Davies's Of Time and the City (and the EIFF programme mentions it too), but this evening Marcello said he had only seen the Davies film last week. He found it very emotional and he could, of course, see the connection people were making to his film. Marcello's film was commissioned by a social welfare foundation in Genoa, run by the Jesuits, who wanted a film made about the waterfront community that they have served for many years. He said that the total budget for the film, including marketing and promotion, was 100k euro, to which the audience gasped.
What Perestroika and La Bocca del Lupo had in common were really creative and complex approaches to narrative. Neither film had a story with a finite beginning, middle and end yet neither film self-consciously played with or 'de-constructed' their narratives. They simply unfolded, looped and overlapped in surprising ways that made the stories feel, to me anyhow, more like actual thinking. The way our thoughts advance and retreat and advance again toward a goal. Sort of like the players on the green pitches in South Africa that are filling all the available screen space in Edinburgh that are not filled up by EIFF screenings. The USA has made it through to the next phase of the tournament. Thrilling for this New Jerseyite.
I head home tomorrow afternoon. But I have a real treat to look forward to before getting on the train to Belfast. I'm going to see the archive of Glaswegian poet Edwin Morgan in the Scottish Poetry Library in the morning. The collection's curator Julie Johnstone has very generously offered to show me some key pieces in the collection. Morgan was, among many things, part of the concrete poetry movement -- a time when visual art and poetry came together in a particularly Scottish flowering. A perfect end to a really rich festival experience.