The perspective of an outside helper

James Holden from Bedford, currently volunteering for the Reel Film Festival in Islington and spending a bit of time with his grandmother in Wellington, kindly offered his services to us just a few days before the start of Borderlines 2014. We were delighted to take him up and he spent about a week with us at The Courtyard on the Festival Desk. Here is how he described the experience.

Festival Desk from above

It was a real pleasure volunteering at the Borderlines festival. Herefordshire boasts fantastic countryside and the location of the festival offers opportunities to view award worthy international feature gems that may otherwise go unnoticed. I had attended the film festival 3 years ago with my Grandmother and was impressed with the festival's diverse programme and relaxed atmosphere. Buying the festival pass would make an educated film buff out of anyone who isn't already.  Naomi, the Festival Director was lovely to be around, as was Jo the festival's Marketing Manager. Alongside Joe, my fellow volunteer, I helped out at the front desk, promoting the festival and the funding campaign, setting up screenings and responding to enquiries. It was all rather relaxed and enjoyable. The festival's board members were a great bunch of film enthusiasts. Lunch at the Courtyard was catered for and of a high standard. The festival was very well attended and we received a lot of positive feedback. One of the perks was that I was allowed to watch the films at the festival for free, my personal highlight was the old French film Le Jour se Lève. I would certainly like to be involved again in the future and would recommend volunteering at the festival to anyone who shares a real passion for film.

Joe helping a customer  on the Festival Desk

 
Look forward to seeing you again James!

A Festival Diary - Wednesday 12 March 2014

Wednesday 12 March 2014
Nobody Knows / Dallas Buyers Club / Exhibition

Nobody Knows

Last week I watched a lot of films about doomed people and sudden death but nothing is more terrifying than watching children left to fend for themselves. I was keen to find out why David Sin had programmed a brief Kore-eda Hirokazu season during Borderlines. In Tokyo a mother, flaky in any culture, makes her 12-year old son the head of the household in Nobody Knows. At this point memories emerged of The Cement Garden, Lord of the Flies and an Italian movie about abandoned children I saw during the early 1990s. Thankfully, the director has his own film to make. He maps out their slide extremely well. We know they can look after themselves because we’re shown they can. That’s not the issue. They cannot keep it up without money.

The soundtrack contains sweet tunes by Gontiti, cello and guitars, very similar to the music the Nottingham band Tindersticks supply for Clare Denis films. It heralds the scenes where children can behave like children and the audience are allowed to relax for a few moments. It’s a director’s pact: nothing bad is going to happen whilst they’re playing. The clutter includes the Othello board game, an indigenous game renamed and imported back to Japan. The film was based on a true story. It demonstrates that when we catch a glimpse of children doing the work of their parents it is simple for us to assume that they’re pretending. Following Le Jour se Lève, it was a bad Borderlines week for teddy bears.

Dallas Buyers Club

Since I booked my ticket for Dallas Buyers Club it’s won a brace of Oscars. Sadly, I told everyone that The Act of Killing was a dead cert for Best Documentary, instead. DBC was a very good film at the time I was watching it. Like “Capote it faded the following day. There are elements of Lorenzo’s Oil [finding a cure] and Erin Brockovich [battling bureaucracy], any number of odd couple movies [the relationship between the Best Actors, leading and supporting, provides more laughs than most comedies], any number of movies where the actors’ bodies are a special effect, a few 1970s Jack Nicholson blue-collar classics [Matthew McConaughey plays an electrician, rodeo rider and hustler] and Kiss of the Spider Woman [Jared Leto rocks that look]. Leto, whose acting has been limited to pop videos for his band 30 Seconds to Mars (Goth/rock) for the past 6 years, like everyone else, does great. Thankfully, despite it being set in the late 1980s, theme park set dressing is at a minimum. There’s one huge mobile phone. Ron Woodruff was diagnosed with HIV and it developed into business.

After five consecutive films regarding some form of death sentence I was more than ready for Exhibition, an art film about a North London couple and their lovely house. During a rare excursion the female lead walks past the Richard Young Gallery in Kensington Church Street. This world is as alien to me as all of the others I’ve seen today. Viv Albertine, guitarist in the all-female power-trio The Slits three decades ago, plays a performance artist. As the old joke has it, you will see several new sides to her in this movie. Liam Gillick plays her partner (I doubt they’re married) and the architect who designed their modernist dwelling. The house – the architect was James Melvin; it was built in 1969 – is the third member of the cast. I watched Elena at Borderlines last year: another film starring husband, wife and the fate of their big, expensive apartment.

Viv Albertine in Exhibition

He wants to sell it – it must be worth well over a million pounds – in order to build a new home / fund his next project. She likes it there. They negotiate matters in a manner only long-established couples can: curious dysfunctional sex and gentle bickering. Given that North London, art and wealth provide ample material for several long-running cartoon strips in Private Eye the director Joanna Hogg does well to keep to her own humour. This film expands after viewing. There’s a good piece about it at cinema-scope.com

Some viewers found the characters’ level of capital impossible to get past. Do they have the same problem with costume dramas? Isn’t it bogus when a film conjures up a nice reason for their characters to be able to afford the nice interiors? We’re asked to accept that they are near the peak of their professions. I can go with that. It’s at the heart of one of their small arguments. Why would a performance artist, or anyone at Dr. or Prof. level in their work, want to bounce ideas off someone with a Sunday supplement grasp of it? Not even when they’ve lived together for a couple of decades.

There’s a sense that the house is a surrogate child. The building is not perfect: it demands regular attention. They work in separate offices (with intercoms) and can hear every sound the other makes. Given her fears about the streets outside their home is a castle too. A lot of these films have a grim ending and this is no exception. A family with three small children move in. They’ve left their shoes on and one of the boys is kicking a football about indoors.

Robin Clarke (Festival volunteer)

A Festival Diary - Wednesday 5 March 2014

Wednesday 5 March 2014
BFI Film Academy / Le Jour se Lève / The Patience Stone / The Golden Dream

Rural Media/BFI Film Academy

It’s the first highpoint of the year: I award myself a day’s leave, drive to Hereford and watch a few films. The first event is free. The Rural Media Company (based five minutes’ walk away) had recruited local, teenage film-makers; the BFI Film Academy provided additional expertise from the very top-drawer. Their work, three shorts, was screened and then a panel of Tony Lawson, Richard Greatrex and Naomi Vera-Sanso supplied constructive criticism, advice and guidance. You can look up Tony and Richard on IMDb and be amazed. Naomi, of course, has been the Producer, then Director of the Borderlines Film Festival since day one.

I waded through a lot of home-made shorts fifteen years ago for a film society doing its bit. The acting was usually good (of the central casting variety), the editing acceptable and the scripts so-so to pretty poor. There were a lot of genre pieces and traditional jokes: the audience is there and they’re easier to make. The big advance is in presentation: today’s low-budget films look far better. If you’re thinking of making one: give the actors more to do and get them to do less. Film-making is far cheaper and swifter than in the Super-8 era. Would it be prohibitive to have a first draft?

The next film was hand-picked by Francine Stock (of Radio 4’s The Film Programme, repeated at 11pm, Sundays) for Borderlines. What fun to see the Institut Français name-checked alongside various local government bodies. Le Jour se Lève is French, black and white, made in 1939, established the dissolve as film language for reminiscence, scripted by a poet, populated with adults and features the iconic film-star representations of their respective genders: Jean Gabin and Arletty. Borderlines screened an Arletty film, Les Enfants du Paradis, last year – another film with a character who believed he could talk his way into or out of everything.  I hope there’s more from Gabin and Arletty next year.

Jean Gabin and Arletty in Le Jour se Lève

I like to book my tickets early, remember nothing but the date and time, then discover more about the film whilst watching it. As the opening credits of The Patience Stone shared the screen with sun-bleached curtains I thought it could be a documentary until ‘based on a novel’ came up. Like the previous feature most of the film takes place in one room – because it’s too dangerous to leave it. And the lead, practically a one-woman-show from Golshifteh Farahani, talks about the events that led to this point. You’d think that festival programmers organised these coincidences deliberately. Having seen Osama (Afghanistan, 2003) last year, at an Amnesty International do, I can report the Afghan woman’s daily life make the adventures of your favourite all-action hero look silly. Mass-production means I can scan the shelves of a bombed-out building in the Middle East and spot a lemon-squeezer just like one my grandmother had. The Patience Stone contains two-and-a-half sex scenes and one joke – a bit like “The Boat That Rocked”.

The Patience Stone

After spending hours watching noble people getting shot at in claustrophobic circumstances The Golden Dream was almost a relief. Think of The Incredible Journey or Stand By Me but with Guatemalan teenagers making their way through Central America, either using Shanks’s pony or riding the deck, to ‘the golden dream’ of a migrant labourer’s position in Los Angeles. The Spanish title, “La jaula de oro”, translates as “the golden cage”. Caged birds turn up a lot in movies: a female resident, with pet, making her retreat in Le Jour se Lève – it’s no place for a budgie; the fighting quails in The Patience Stone that pinpoint a girl’s place in a patriarchal pecking order. You could fill a festival with caged bird movies.

The Golden Dream

The lives of the immigrants in The Golden Dream are valued even lower than Taliban girls. Loose ends are not resolved but it’s probable they will end terminally. The film is the debut feature of Diego Quemada-Diaz, camera assistant to Ken Loach. A couple of days later I attended a lecture by Barrie Trinder, an authority on the Industrial Revolution in the Midlands, about bargemen on the Severn. They worked, stole and gave street performances, no different to the travellers in this film.

Robin Clarke (Festival Volunteer)