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The following is the remainder of an interview with Elliot Grove, the founder of Raindance, who tells The Yorker about the festival and its plans for the near future.
The festival is now touring Manchester. Can you tell us of the team’s efforts to try and get the festival out of London?
Elliot Grove: The tragedy of our festival, we think we do have a stellar line-up that rivals any other festival in Europe, but the tragedy is of course that once it plays and credits go on it’s almost impossible to see most of these films again which are too extreme for most distributors to tackle. We’ve been approached by people and we are approaching people not only in Britain but in other European countries to take the best of Raindance to countries as far afield as Hungary, India, America, and indeed other cities in Britain like Manchester, which is a very conscious decision of ours and one that we’re seeking financial partners on. We also have something called Raindance.tv and tonight for example five of our extremely good films, a documentary in one case about Afghanistan which I just saw and I’m still shaking from, is screening for free tonight on the Internet. But that is something we’ve been doing on the Internet since 2004, we sort of led the way on that ... to be able to go and see a film of note is something I think will have a market, in fact does have a market.
I think so; you do have a market, especially in towns where there are universities and there are students interested in film and cannot really come to London on a regular basis.
EG: Our challenge is to find partners in cities like York, film societies, and see how we can make this work. One of the ideas we have is a film festival in a box which would be a video projector and a series of DVDs that we have the rights to screen and posters. So you get the poster, you put in your dates of screenings, let’s say York, but then you also leave a little room for the local films by local filmmakers so that whoever the organiser is would pay for the box to come, maybe a small licence fee and that money would be given to the filmmakers of whose films were showing and then hopefully that way get the word out and also involve people. People in York are very valuable to us simply because our community these days is not so much about being in London or in New York. There was a film playing yesterday called Incredibly Small (Dean Peterson) that was written and directed by someone in Chicago with an editor from Los Angeles and a composer from New York. Those three people had never met but they tend to do those things in America which is a much bigger country than Britain. This is also something we’re trying to foster, networking online, not that I like online networking but it’s just a fact of life and makes it possible that you can access talent in the far far corner of the world or the country that would otherwise be denied to you.
What makes an opening and a closing night film?
EG: We always look for an opening and a closing night for two things. A, we need to sell tickets because if we don’t we die. Secondly we are always looking for something that fills in with the ethos of Raindance independent spirit if you like. And our opening night film was made for hardly any money over a course of three years by some local filmmakers which was unique. Our closing night film was of interest even solely on the fact that looks like it’s going to be the first ever Iraqi film nominated for an Oscar and dealing with very, very important issues.
How have audiences responded to the festival in terms of attendance and feedback?
EG: Our attendance this year is equal to our record-breaking last year and the feedback we’ve had in our list of films has been nothing other than overwhelmingly positive for which we’re all delighted. Except for the L.A. Zombie (Bruce LaBruce) films where we had walkouts.
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