Festival History

Keswick Film Festival - A Walk Through History

Is this your first Festival & you're wondering what previous years were like? Or perhaps you're a Festival regular with happy memories of every year? Whether you're new to the event or want to revel in remembrance of films past, Keswick Film Club Chairman Rod Evans takes you on a journey through the past, beginning with the first ever Keswick Film Festival in 2000 and then remembering the growth of the Festival in 2002 ...

KFF1 - 2000

It all started in a moment of typical enthusiasm from Keswick Film Club's founder, Tony Martin. Once we'd got the Club off the ground, and the spring 1999 season was progressing well, Tony, casting around for new challenges, said: 'well, that's looking good; perhaps we should try a festival next?' The idea was taken up enthusiastically - there were several film versions of Shakespeare plays either on release or in the offing that year, so it was a natural choice to include a strand of these, add a dash of Kieslowski (Three Colours Trilogy) and some 'Best of the Fests' and we were away... The programming was the easy part, but a need for fund-raising was soon apparent. Beginners' luck was on our side (or perhaps more accurately, discerning funders were willing to encourage a new initiative) and those in the know were surprised and impressed to see £1000 coming our way from the BFI. With more handsome sums coming in from Awards for All (Lottery), Northern Arts (we were Newcastle-oriented in those days) and the Foundation for Sport and the Arts (as well as Allerdale, Keswick and some sponsorship) it was all as encouraging as one could have hoped.

All that was needed after that was a lot of hard work on the part of Ian Picken (Festival Co-ordinator), Chairman Tony and Secretary Rod. Spring half-term 2000 was chosen because we thought that Keswick's B & Bs needed filling at a slack time of the year (what idealism!) and the Theatre 'goes dark' through that period, so film projection can take place when the stage is undergoing maintenance.

All went well, the films were much enjoyed (by smallish audiences) and, unsurprisingly, we ended up with a healthy surplus to carry forward to 2001, thanks to the funders' generosity and the whole enterprise (apart from film projection) benefiting from volunteer labour.

KFF2 - 2001: The Festival's second year

With the experience of running one festival and some cash in the bank, there was little question about keeping Keswick Film Festival alive, so when discussion turned to the programming of 'KFF2' we decided to stick to the recipe. Not to search for more Shakespeare, but to respond to the obvious desire on the part of our audiences (not, on the whole, in the first flush of youth) to enjoy a literary approach to cinema. So minds were focussed and a name for a strand was proposed: 'Literature Through the Lens'. This was relatively easy - put together some older Literary adaptations: Melville's 1950 version of Cocteau's Les Enfants terribles, Truffaut's take on the Ray Bradbury novel Fahrenheit 451, and, because we had an opera lover on the selection panel, Zeffirelli's version of Verdi's version of a Dumas story, La Traviata. Then add the contemporary crop of intelligent literary movies, such as Edith Wharton's House of Mirth by Terence Davies, Nick Hornby's High Fidelity by Stephen Frears, Raoul Ruiz's direction of Time Regained, Patricia Rozema's Mansfield Park and the Mike Figgis/Strindberg Miss Julie. Well, we couldn't resist just one Shakespeare, when Julie Taymor's Titus became available.

How to replace Kieslowski? Not quite from the same stable, but the Coen brothers seemed a pretty good stand-in. Blood Simple, Fargo and the bang up to date O Brother Where Art Thou? were the choices - the latter of course being inspired by our fourth film of that strand, Preston Sturges's Sullivan's Travels made back in 1941.

This is the time to apologise for the list-like description of KFF2 hitherto: the brochure for this festival was an example of how not to advertise your activity. The font is tiny, the film titles in light green, therefore unphotographable, and the list is not chronological, so ultimately confusing and unfit to reproduce here. Be warned!

To round off the programme, there was another stab at 'Best of the Fests' comprising Laurent Cantet's Ressources Humaines, Hideo Nakata's Ring and Abbas Kiarostami's The Wind Will Carry Us (not the best possible choice for rounding off a festival). There was also a Box o' Shorts and the event's opening film Once Upon a Time in the West which screened to all of 33 people at 10am on the Friday at the Alhambra. Ah well, you learn from your mistakes...

The comforting thought for the organisers when planning all this was that we had secured a £4000 guarantee against loss from Northern Arts, through the magic wand of our good fairy Katherine Anderson - at that time Film Exhibition Officer of NA, and of whom more later. However, Awards for All and one or two other generous funders ensured that we didn't have to draw on much of this sum, ticket sales remained steady, audiences averaged just over 50, and we approached KFF3 in 2002 with confidence undented.

KFF3 February 2002

Ian (who had become Chairman following Founder/Chairman Tony Martin's departure in March 2000) and Rod undertook to do most of the work for KFF3, with help from other members of the Film Club committee. As our experience with 'strands' had so far been quite positive, some individuals' enthusiasms were translated into the decision to go with the following themes and films: 'Best of the Fests' had seemed unfailingly popular, so we selected Kenneth Lonergan's You Can Count On Me, Lucrecia Martel's La Cienaga (The Swamp), David Gordon Green's George Washington, Jean-Pierre Jeunet's Amélie and Oscar Rohler's No Place to Go (Die Unberuhrbare). Unsurprisingly, Amélie swept the board in this (non) competition.

There was strong committee support for German Cinema - after all, Wenders and Fassbinder had been making great films for years. Unfortunately it transpired that the rights to all the films by those gentlemen had reverted to Germany and they were unobtainable! Never mind, we found two great classics in Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Pabst's Pandora's Box - the latter with an excellent accompaniment by Neil Brand's piano: an unforgettable experience. Add to those Volker Schlondorff's The Tin Drum, and Werner Herzog's Mein Liebster Feind (My Best Fiend) featuring the astonishing Klaus Kinski. Rohler's No Place To go qualified here too, of course.

More committee input persuaded us to try animation ('Drawn to be Wild') - either a notable lack hitherto, or a pleasing absence, depending on your taste - so we opted for Katsushiro Otomo's Akira, Jan Svankmajer's Faust, and Atlantis: The Lost Empire by Gary Trousdale and Kirk Wise. Akira in particular proved very popular, converting some of the most unlikely punters.

But the really good idea seemed to be a strand called 'Painting With Light' - Great British Cinematographers. The Chosen Few were Jack Cardiff (The African Queen), Roger Deakins (The Hudsucker Proxy), Chris Menges (The Killing Fields) and Geoffrey Unsworth (2001 - A Space Odyssey). Good films all, but they didn't pull in the crowds. Mind you, nor did anything else this year, except for Amélie, riding the crest of her wave of popularity. However, it proved a good idea because Jack Cardiff agreed to come to Keswick (fairly late in the day, as he was still working, aged 88) although he couldn't tell us before mid-January so we lost much of the chance to use him as a draw for aficionados of his work. There's a story to illustrate this...

Jack Cardiff was and still is regarded as a hugely influential figure in the world of cinematography because of his extraordinarily long career and quantity of highly successful films, his inventiveness and painterly comprehension of his director's intentions. He's still giving talks and making public appearances today, I believe Our choice for Jack's film was The African Queen which he lit for John Huston in 1951. So, it being my turn to look after him on that Sunday morning at the Keswick Alhambra, there we were sitting in the stalls ready to see the movie. Our timing of the programme must have been as bad as the promotion of the film, for there we were surrounded by an audience of...27 people. Sitting there with perhaps the world's greatest cinematographer watching a re-run of his own creation. Jack was entirely unperturbed by this - we had already been down to the lake for a TV crew to film us pretending to pull one of the launches ashore at the end of a rope, just like Humphrey Bogart in the film, and he took it all in his stride - but when the film started, the image on screen was a kind of pinkish-grey hue. Jack just turned to me and said: 'this is the kind of rubbishy print we used to send to Africa!' But he sat uncomplainingly through it, and we went off afterwards for a good lunch. A most charming man, who is able to recount fascinating stories and experiences at the drop of a hat: it was a great pleasure to host Jack and his wife Niki in Keswick.

All good fun, but it has to be admitted that the films didn't pull in big enough audiences (averaging about 40 - thank goodness for Amélie!), even though they could be stoutly defended for their quality: a rethink would be needed if Keswick Film Festival wasn't to run into trouble ahead.