Raindance Film Festival: Interview with Elliot Grove, Raindance founder: Part 1

Raindance Film Festival was great fun, particularly for those of us who attended for the first time. The films were riveting and the workshops very insightful. The following is an interview with Elliot Grove, Raindance founder, who tells The Yorker about the origins of the festival, its identity, and Raindance plans for the near future.

What was the state of independent film in the UK before Raindance?

Elliot Grove: Britain had a hugely successful film business up until the mid sixties, making 200 to 250 features a year if you counted all the Carry On films and the Hammer House of Horror and so on but then terrestrial television happened and all the film people moved out of irregular well paid work to regular paid work in television and when I started Raindance in 1992 there were only six feature films made that year, this year over 125 (were made).

How about in terms of exposure? Was there any space where independent films could be shown?

EG: I started Raindance because so many British filmmakers were then making films partly because of the influence of Raindance and at that time there was nowhere to show them unless it was Edinburgh or London Film Festivals and because the programmers for those film festivals hadn’t seen British films for fifteen or twenty years they didn’t know what to do with them so they put them into the world cinema selection alongside the Japanese and the French and the German and so on. I started Raindance initially for British films right in the heart of London’s West End as where we sit today but of course I found out something really horrible about you British people (I’m Canadian). British people are very snobbish and they looked at our early posters and they didn’t see the logos of any big brands or government agencies and assumed this was just a fly bonnet operation and ignored us but who came those first few years were the British filmmakers, the French, the Japanese and so on and it wasn’t until we were about ten years old that actually British filmmakers viewed a screening at Raindance as something of note.

How would you describe Raindance? What makes it different from other festivals?

EG: Raindance is very different from any other major festivals, for example the London Film Festival here in town, or Sundance, Berlin or Cannes, for two reasons. First, we’re very very small, we’re a boutique. And secondly we tend to focus on the work by debut directors on their first or second feature films; it’s the majority of our work. I’m always asked what makes a Raindance movie which is extreme and by extreme I mean a combination of extreme filmmaking techniques, extreme story telling techniques, extreme topics as we’ve had many such this year and of course they have to be to screen at Raindance, extremely good.

In this respect, Raindance has claimed this is the most daring and original festival line-up so far, what makes it so?

EG: This year we’re tracking a half a dozen films from roughly this time last year and five of the films that we’ve programmed, when we announced our line-up in September 7th we were dogged by controversy from the left wing, from the right wing, from local government, from the censors because these films had suddenly achieved notoriety in other countries, they’d been banned and so on. So we had to go through a great deal of extra administrative work to make sure that we were able to show the films safe for the audience, safe for this cinema (Apollo West End) to protect its entertainment licence, and of course since there are people in positions of power in this country, civil servants, we had to make sure that they were safe for you the general public, even though you’re over eighteen, so your minds wouldn’t be twisted or warped by something that we showed.

There's more to come from our coverage of Raindance so keep reading The Yorker for Part 2 of this interview and more on the festival.

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