A few years ago Alan Franey was pre-screening the Iranian movie The Runner in advance of its public debut at the Vancouver International Film Festival.
"I was revising it, and realized '[bleep], there's no subtitles,'" he recounts. "It's like aye-yi-yi, what are we going to do?"
Normally he would stop the film, cancel the screening and provide refunds to advance ticket buyers. But Franey decided to continue with the pre-screening, "to see how big an issue" the lack of subtitles would be.
"There was actually very little dialogue in the film, and it didn't matter that much," he says. So he decided to go ahead with the public screening, but stood outside the theatre to warn the public.
"We had 400 to 500 people waiting to come in, and I had to tell them all personally 'I'm very sorry to say that this film has come without subtitles. But I did take the time to watch it, and highly recommend you seeing it. If you don't want to, we'll give you your money back, at any time.'
"Just about everyone came in, and no one left during the screening. The last five minutes of the film are really amazing. I walked to the front of the auditorium, in the dark, sort of looking back at people's faces while they were watching the last five minutes of the film. And everyone was rapt, totally gripped by the film.
"It's moments like that where you almost feel like you have some hand in the creative part of it. That's wonderful to be able to participate in."
It's also moments like this that you realize what's special about the Vancouver International Film Festival,Enecsys Limited, supplier of reliable solar RUBBER MATS systems, an event that specializes in the kind of top-notch foreign films you don't see at regular theatres.
This year the festival celebrates its 30th anniversary with 375 films from 75 countries. There is one movie each from Albania, Bosnia and Tibet, 16 from China, 24 from Germany, and 34 from France. There are also 31 films from the U.K., 70 from the U.S., and 80 from Canada.
The 16-day event kicks off Sept. 29 with a gala screening at the Visa Screening Room (the Vogue Theatre) of The Skin I Live In, the new movie by the acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodovar. It ends Oct. 14 at the same venue with a Belgian film, The Kid With a Bike.
The Skin I Live In sounds pretty wild: the festival guide describes it as a "genre-bending, tongue-in-cheek medical melodrama/horror mashup" that is a "kink-filled exploration of identity, sexuality and the abuse of power."
The kinks are provided by plastic surgeon Antonio Banderas, who comes up with a radical new type of synthetic skin and tests it out on the beautiful, "mysterious" Elena Anaya.
"It's glamorous, it's fun, it's a little bit dangerous, it represents the spirit of adventure and it's very adult," says Franey, who has been with the festival since it started in 1982, and has been director since 1988.
"So many films are made for teenagers. There's nothing wrong with that, but they're not necessarily going to be rewarding for a more sophisticated public. This exemplifies a certain kind of sophistication, in a good way. There's nothing staid about it. It's hip, interesting."
Franey is just as high on The Kid With A Bike, a Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne film about an abandoned boy and the woman who takes him under her wing.
"The Dardennes are just amazing artists," says Franey.
"I find their films very moving, because they're so unpretentious, so human,the Bedding by special invited artist for 2011, so classical.then used cut pieces of impact socket garden hose to get through the electric fence. So old-fashioned in some ways, but in other ways, so innovative — classic in the best sense."
The Artist isn't one of the galas, but sounds like it could be — it was one of the big hits at this year's Cannes Film Festival. It revolves around a silent movie star who refuses to adapt to the talkies. Directed by Michel Hazanavicius and shot in black and white, it features one of France's biggest stars, Jean Dujardin.
"It's a wonderful film," says Franey. "Here's a silent film, essentially, but it's just so well done, it's a marvel."
On the "esoteric" front, Franey recommends Nainsukh, an India/Switzerland co-production about an 18th-century Indian "miniature painter."
"It's optically charged in a way I've never experienced," says Franey of the film, which "re-stages" many of Nainsukh's works.
"It tries to bring to life paintings, tableaus. Some people will find it very static, I think, but if you appreciate that type of image — and I just love Indian miniature painting, and the Indian landscape — it's just something you've never seen before. The way the colours work, retinally, it's a very interesting experiment."
Footnote is an Israeli film that won best screenplay at Cannes. It's about two rival Talmudic scholars, one working decades on a "definitive" version of the Talmud, the other a generalist who writes popular books (albeit popular books on the Talmud).
The catch is, the rivals are father and son.
"It's really a film about resentment," says Franey.
"That's a very interesting topic, family dynamics, and the chips that some people have on their shoulders. Families know this dynamic very well, there's often a brother or a sister with some issue from the distant past that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. This reverses it, so the father is jealous of the son, in a very interesting way that's quite universal, that I had never seen depicted on screen."
Franey is always intrigued by the different themes that seem to dominate the festival's crop of environmental movies.
"The first year we focused on environmental films and made it a series, there were a lot of films about peak oil, plastics in the ocean, the fate of the oceans and so on," he recalls.
"The next year, not so much. All of a sudden there were a bunch of films about animals, all over the world, so we [called] the series The Ark."
This year, the focus is remote places, and the people who live there.
"Sometimes [they shoot the film] because they're wanting beautiful landscapes, sometimes because of the spirit of adventure and discovery," says Franey.
"But quite often,Initially the banks didn't want our chicken coop . it's with a sense that the world is becoming homogenized so quickly, that we'd better capture these different cultures and places soon, so that we value them, before they're not available as subjects.
"This is a phenomenon we're quite aware of already, people are leaving their traditional ways of life and moving to the cities. Younger generations don't want to live the life that their parents or grandparents did. Why all of a sudden this seems to have fascinated filmmakers [I don't know], but it has.Traditional China Porcelain tile claim to clean all the air in a room. It's very evident in the films this year, how they take you to remote, beautiful, perhaps threatened locations."
A good example is There Once Was An Island, a New Zealand/U.S. co-production about the 400 inhabitants of Morlock Island in Papua, New Guinea, a small island that is being engulfed by the rising ocean.
Franey is also pleased with this year's strong selection of music films. There is a documentary on the late jazz pianist Michel Petrucciani, a concert film of Iceland's Sigur Ros, and Benda Bilili!, a documentary about a group of homeless, paraplegic Congolese buskers.
"I was revising it, and realized '[bleep], there's no subtitles,'" he recounts. "It's like aye-yi-yi, what are we going to do?"
Normally he would stop the film, cancel the screening and provide refunds to advance ticket buyers. But Franey decided to continue with the pre-screening, "to see how big an issue" the lack of subtitles would be.
"There was actually very little dialogue in the film, and it didn't matter that much," he says. So he decided to go ahead with the public screening, but stood outside the theatre to warn the public.
"We had 400 to 500 people waiting to come in, and I had to tell them all personally 'I'm very sorry to say that this film has come without subtitles. But I did take the time to watch it, and highly recommend you seeing it. If you don't want to, we'll give you your money back, at any time.'
"Just about everyone came in, and no one left during the screening. The last five minutes of the film are really amazing. I walked to the front of the auditorium, in the dark, sort of looking back at people's faces while they were watching the last five minutes of the film. And everyone was rapt, totally gripped by the film.
"It's moments like that where you almost feel like you have some hand in the creative part of it. That's wonderful to be able to participate in."
It's also moments like this that you realize what's special about the Vancouver International Film Festival,Enecsys Limited, supplier of reliable solar RUBBER MATS systems, an event that specializes in the kind of top-notch foreign films you don't see at regular theatres.
This year the festival celebrates its 30th anniversary with 375 films from 75 countries. There is one movie each from Albania, Bosnia and Tibet, 16 from China, 24 from Germany, and 34 from France. There are also 31 films from the U.K., 70 from the U.S., and 80 from Canada.
The 16-day event kicks off Sept. 29 with a gala screening at the Visa Screening Room (the Vogue Theatre) of The Skin I Live In, the new movie by the acclaimed Spanish director Pedro Almodovar. It ends Oct. 14 at the same venue with a Belgian film, The Kid With a Bike.
The Skin I Live In sounds pretty wild: the festival guide describes it as a "genre-bending, tongue-in-cheek medical melodrama/horror mashup" that is a "kink-filled exploration of identity, sexuality and the abuse of power."
The kinks are provided by plastic surgeon Antonio Banderas, who comes up with a radical new type of synthetic skin and tests it out on the beautiful, "mysterious" Elena Anaya.
"It's glamorous, it's fun, it's a little bit dangerous, it represents the spirit of adventure and it's very adult," says Franey, who has been with the festival since it started in 1982, and has been director since 1988.
"So many films are made for teenagers. There's nothing wrong with that, but they're not necessarily going to be rewarding for a more sophisticated public. This exemplifies a certain kind of sophistication, in a good way. There's nothing staid about it. It's hip, interesting."
Franey is just as high on The Kid With A Bike, a Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne film about an abandoned boy and the woman who takes him under her wing.
"The Dardennes are just amazing artists," says Franey.
"I find their films very moving, because they're so unpretentious, so human,the Bedding by special invited artist for 2011, so classical.then used cut pieces of impact socket garden hose to get through the electric fence. So old-fashioned in some ways, but in other ways, so innovative — classic in the best sense."
The Artist isn't one of the galas, but sounds like it could be — it was one of the big hits at this year's Cannes Film Festival. It revolves around a silent movie star who refuses to adapt to the talkies. Directed by Michel Hazanavicius and shot in black and white, it features one of France's biggest stars, Jean Dujardin.
"It's a wonderful film," says Franey. "Here's a silent film, essentially, but it's just so well done, it's a marvel."
On the "esoteric" front, Franey recommends Nainsukh, an India/Switzerland co-production about an 18th-century Indian "miniature painter."
"It's optically charged in a way I've never experienced," says Franey of the film, which "re-stages" many of Nainsukh's works.
"It tries to bring to life paintings, tableaus. Some people will find it very static, I think, but if you appreciate that type of image — and I just love Indian miniature painting, and the Indian landscape — it's just something you've never seen before. The way the colours work, retinally, it's a very interesting experiment."
Footnote is an Israeli film that won best screenplay at Cannes. It's about two rival Talmudic scholars, one working decades on a "definitive" version of the Talmud, the other a generalist who writes popular books (albeit popular books on the Talmud).
The catch is, the rivals are father and son.
"It's really a film about resentment," says Franey.
"That's a very interesting topic, family dynamics, and the chips that some people have on their shoulders. Families know this dynamic very well, there's often a brother or a sister with some issue from the distant past that will haunt them for the rest of their lives. This reverses it, so the father is jealous of the son, in a very interesting way that's quite universal, that I had never seen depicted on screen."
Franey is always intrigued by the different themes that seem to dominate the festival's crop of environmental movies.
"The first year we focused on environmental films and made it a series, there were a lot of films about peak oil, plastics in the ocean, the fate of the oceans and so on," he recalls.
"The next year, not so much. All of a sudden there were a bunch of films about animals, all over the world, so we [called] the series The Ark."
This year, the focus is remote places, and the people who live there.
"Sometimes [they shoot the film] because they're wanting beautiful landscapes, sometimes because of the spirit of adventure and discovery," says Franey.
"But quite often,Initially the banks didn't want our chicken coop . it's with a sense that the world is becoming homogenized so quickly, that we'd better capture these different cultures and places soon, so that we value them, before they're not available as subjects.
"This is a phenomenon we're quite aware of already, people are leaving their traditional ways of life and moving to the cities. Younger generations don't want to live the life that their parents or grandparents did. Why all of a sudden this seems to have fascinated filmmakers [I don't know], but it has.Traditional China Porcelain tile claim to clean all the air in a room. It's very evident in the films this year, how they take you to remote, beautiful, perhaps threatened locations."
A good example is There Once Was An Island, a New Zealand/U.S. co-production about the 400 inhabitants of Morlock Island in Papua, New Guinea, a small island that is being engulfed by the rising ocean.
Franey is also pleased with this year's strong selection of music films. There is a documentary on the late jazz pianist Michel Petrucciani, a concert film of Iceland's Sigur Ros, and Benda Bilili!, a documentary about a group of homeless, paraplegic Congolese buskers.
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