Celebrating international film this summer at Chichester

At the official launch of the 24th annual Chichester International Film Festival, a filmgoer in the cinema’s foyer is overheard expressing his disbelief at the longevity of the event. “I told Roger when the festival started that he wouldn’t be able to keep it going for long. I can’t believe it’s been 24 years now.”

The Roger in question is Mr Gibson, the artistic director of the festival and artistic consultant at New Park Cinema in Chichester, where the 18-day celebration of worldwide film is held.

Gibson created the cinema out of a film society at Chichester College in 1979, but it wasn’t until 1992 that the notion of a local festival came to fruition, initially taking the form of a “pretty modest seven day event,” as Gibson puts it.

As the festival lurches towards its quarter-of-a-century milestone, its director admits he couldn’t have imaged it would become such an integral part of the South Coast’s cultural diary.

“Oh no, no” laughs Gibson. “We started off without much prominence, but now people say to me: ‘18 days, that’s a long festival!’ It is, but you have to remember that most festivals have up to 20 screens. It’s all a bit more compact here.”

Gibson hints at the pressures of running an internationally renowned festival on a relatively tight budget here – while there are plans for a second and third screen at New Park, Gibson has to be canny in his negotiations to secure enticing films and put together a festival schedule that befits the ever-growing reputation of the event.

“When you mention the words ‘film festival’ to film distributors, they immediately equate you with Edinburgh and Cannes and want a minimum of 500 or 1000 Euros, which is ridiculous,” says Gibson. “We haven’t got millions of pounds in our budget. You have to argue that is worth it for the sales company to allow us to show a film. You have to say: ‘Look, if we don’t show it here then it won’t be shown anywhere in the UK.’”

The impressive amount of UK premieres on show year upon year at the festival is testament to Gibson’s bargaining prowess, but his account of visiting a St Petersburg film market recently in search of new movies emphasises the comparative wealth of his business competitors.

“When we got there we found that the sellers weren’t as interested in film festivals as out-and-out film buyers. These buyers come from all over the place, including India and Sunset Boulevard – I was just a director of a festival, I wasn’t one of these people with a big chequebook! As you can see though, I persuaded the agents to show some Russian films.”

‘Some’ is rather an understatement. There are no fewer than seven UK premieres of Russian films (an amount that even Gibson says is “unusual” for the festival), as well as a further four older releases and two silent cinema classics.

Gibson explains that “a number of the contemporary Russian releases that we are showing are direct attacks on Vladimir Putin,” and cites Yuriy Bykov’s The Fool as the most pertinent example of this counter-cultural attitude.

Another scheduled Russian film that has attracted interest is Two Women, which, remarkably, sees Ralph Fiennes turn in a performance speaking entirely in Russian. Gibson is hoping Fiennes will attend the closing gala (in which Two Women will be shown), but admits that “you never really know with these things.”

Every year’s festival has a ‘surprise film’, the identity of which isn’t announced until the opening credits. While Gibson says that the idea backfired somewhat in the festival’s earlier years due to “conservative” audiences – to the extent that the cinema promised to refund filmgoers if they left the auditorium before the film had ended – it has fully caught on now, and is one of the highlights each year. Woody Allen’s popular drama Blue Jasmine was the secret film in 2013, and the uplifting picture based on LGBT rights, Pride, was 2014’s (and was actually voted film of the festival). This year’s pick has a lot to live up to - but Gibson is certain it will go down well.

“This year I didn’t have anything lined up, and I didn’t want to put one in knowing it wouldn’t be as good as previous years. And then a distributor phoned me – which is very rare! – asking if we were still doing the festival and if I’d be interested in this film. I almost fell out of my chair! I won’t say anymore.”

The festival is sponsored by The University Of Chichester, and its director is hoping the presence of newly-released, youth-orientated films on the line-up, such as Diary Of A Teenage Girl, the USA movie about sexual awakening, and independent rom-com My Accomplice, set in Brighton and directed by local filmmaker Charlie Weaver Rolfe, attracts an influx of young filmgoers. As much as Gibson thinks that will be the case, though, he admits his disappointment with British film students during his stint as a tutor at the College.

“I found it was mainly the foreign students that were interested,” he says. “The English students, unless it was Star Wars, didn’t seem to be interested. They didn’t seem to have much ambition. It was quite frustrating. It’s good to have an appetite, not to have closed eyes and ears.”

No such problems for Gibson himself – one only need cast an eye over this year’s festival schedule to appreciate the director’s unwavering appetite for film, on these shores and abroad. In his 36th year with New Park Cinema, Gibson’s enduring affection for his creation is plain for all to see.

“I can’t imagine life without the cinema!”

The Chichester International Film Festival runs until August 30. For more information visit: www.chichestercinema.org/

Edwin Gilson

Chichester International Film Festival highlights

Russian Cinema
There is a distinctly Russian flavour to this year’s festival, with no less than six UK premieres (and one European premiere) of new Russian cinema. The hotly anticipated Two Women – based on a play by Ivan Turgenev and starring a Russian-speaking Ralph Fiennes – is the last film of the festival, with producer Natalia Ivanova, director Vera Glagoleva and Fiennes scheduled to appear at the accompanying closing gala (Sunday, August 30 – food at Brasserie Blanc at 6.30pm, film 8.30pm). Fiennes also appears in his sister Martha Fiennes’s Onegin (Saturday, August 29, 6pm), a 1999 adaptation of Alexander Pushkin’s classic novel based around unrequited love. Martha Fiennes is due to introduce the film. New Russian films on show this year include Ramil Salakhutdinov’s St. Petersburg-set thriller A White White Night (Wednesday, August 19, 2.45pm), Chagall-Malevich, Aleksandr Mitta’s dramatization of the rivalry between Russian painters March Chagall and Kazmir Malevich (Monday, Aug 17, 6pm), and The Fool, Yuriy Bykov’s allegorical portrayal of Putin’s Russia (Thursday, August 27, 8.30pm). Young director Andrey Zvyaginstev, whose latest film Leviathan won the Oscar for best foreign film last year, is celebrated with showings of three of his previous films: The Return (Tuesday, August 25, 6.15pm), The Banishment (Wednesday, August 27, 8pm) and Elena (Thursday, August 27, 5.45pm). Leviathan, which deals with contemporary Russian corruption, will be shown on Friday, 28 August at 6pm. Tying together the modern Russian films is an illustrated talk by respected BFI curator Ian Christie, entitled Whatever Happened To Russian Cinema (Saturday, August 29, 4pm), which examines both Russian film over the ages and its current state in the Putin-led nation. There are two historic silent Russian films on offer, too: classic documentary Man With A Movie Camera is showing on Wednesday, August 26, 1pm and 1925 epic Battleship Potemkin will be screened in St. John’s Chapel with a live piano accompaniment from John Sweeney (Friday, August 28, 9.15pm).

Julianne Moore
Off the back of Julianne Moore winning Best Actress at last year’s Oscars, Golden Globes and BAFTAs for her portrayal of an Alzheimer’s sufferer in Still Alice, the American is honoured at the Chichester Film Festival with a special retrospective. These six films span from her role in the 1997 film The End Of The Affair (Thursday, August 20, 6.15pm) – in which Moore plays an adulterous lover alongside Ralph Fiennes – through to Still Alice (Monday, August 24, 11.30pm) via 2002’s Far From Heaven (Friday, 21 August, 6.15pm), Todd Haynes’s deconstruction of the American Dream, Moore’s Oscar-winning turn in 2007 true story Savage Grace (Saturday, August 22, 8.30pm), the 2012 adaptation of Henry James’s novel What Maisie Knew (Sunday, August 23, 6.15pm) and David Cronenberg’s 2013 send-up of Hollywood Maps To The Stars (Tuesday, August 25, 10.30pm). Philip Kemp will investigate her rich movie career in his illustrated talk Julianne Moore: Risk-Taker, which takes place on Monday, August 24 at 2pm.

Orson Welles
2015 marks 100 years since the birth of legendary American actor, director, writer and producer Orson Welles, and there is a chance to see seven of his original films at the festival, including his stunning debut Citizen Kane (Friday, August 14, 4.15pm), film noir classic The Third Man (Monday, August 17, 4.15pm) and the Franz Kafka adaptation The Trial (Friday, August 21, 8.30pm) as well as two documentary features on Welles. Magician: The Astonishing Life And Work of Orson Welles is a touching and informative portrait of the actor featuring testimonies from his family and colleagues, whilst Around the World With Orson Welles is a six-part documentary (originally shown on the BBC) broadcasting Welles’s own wide-ranging travelogues. Episodes 1-3 will be shown on Thursday, August 27 at 4pm, and 4-6 the next day at 4.30pm.

Brighton-based films
There is a world premiere at the festival for Sylvie Collier’s documentary Tasting My Future (Friday, August 14, 2pm), which follows women who have escaped turmoil in their home countries and sought refuge in Brighton. Filmed in various locations around Brighton And Hove, the film features one woman who survived a bomb in Baghdad, another who walked for two days and nights through Africa to escape her father’s killers, and many more with tragic yet ultimately inspiring stories. One thing that unites the female refugees from various countries is a love for cooking, and the film’s touching centrepiece is an international banquet cooked up by the immigrants together in Brighton. Collier, producer Cathy Maxwell and Reem Abushawareb (the Baghdad bomb survivor) will all be in attendance at an audience Q & A after the screening.
My Accomplice (Saturday, 15 August, 6.15pm) is a very different Brighton-set film. A new release by local director Charlie Weaver Rolfe, who will introduce his film and answer questions after the showing, this eccentric comedy was partly crowd-funded. Displaying Brighton at its vibrant best, My Accomplice features a number of local bands as well as some pleasingly familiar settings.

Focus on Film Music
There is a heavy emphasis on music scored for films this year, and specifically the work of British composer William Alwyn. A contemporary of Benjamin Britten, Alwyn wrote scores for more than 200 films during his long career. Four Alwyn-scored films – Carol Reed’s pictures Odd Man Out (Saturday, August 15, 3.30pm) and The Fallen Idol (Sunday, August 16, 3.30pm), John Boulting’s The Magic Box (Saturday, August 22, 3.30pm), and Ronald Neame’s The Card (Sunday, August 23, 3.30pm) will be screened with a condensed performance of Alwyn’s soundtrack by Chichester orchestra The Park Lane Group beforehand. There is a £45 package available for all four of these films and performances plus an illustrated talk on William Alwyn’s life and work by writer Andrew Palmer. Five other classic films, scored again by Alwyn, will be screened without any live music presentations beforehand. There is also a unique opportunity to hear celebrated composer Carl Davis, who wrote music for Charlie Chaplin’s series of silent movies The Mutuals, talk about Chaplin’s early years and life in film (Monday, August 17, 6.30pm).