Clare Stewart came to the BFI London Film Festival in 2011 from running the Sydney Film Festival in Australia. She spoke with Women and Hollywood before the 60th edition of the fest kicks off with Amma Asante’s “A United Kingdom.” The BFI London Film Festival runs from October 5-16.
W&H: You’re in the final throes of preparation. Are you excited?
CS: I’m kind of twitching for it to happen now. What’s keeping me very focused at the moment is the temporary build of a cinema in the Victoria Embankment Gardens on the opposite side of the river here at BFI South Bank. I’m sort of constantly dipping in and out of our time lapse camera feed to see how that’s going. It’s exciting to see that taking shape.
W&H: Is that going to be used for the festival?
CS: Yes. It’s a purpose built cinema for the festival. It will be the home this year for our galas, which is in part a kind of celebration of our 60th anniversary, and also a pragmatic solution to the fact that, like many metropolitan centers around the world, London is facing a scenario where the landscape of cinema screens are changing very radically, disappearing or downsizing. So we’ve decided not to be daunted by that fact and to tackle it head on with this fabulous new build.
W&H: Do you mean cinemas that are curated cinemas or the big Hollywood type of cinemas are disappearing?
CS: It’s kind of across the board. We’ve quite literally lost the Odeon West End which had previously been the home for our headline galas and competition films. So the main Odeon in Leicester Square is still where we will do our big headline galas. A number of other cinemas are refurbishing with smaller screen sizes in terms of audience capacity. So its not so much to do with the kind of nature of the content, of the programs, as much as it is to do with the actual structure of exhibition and cinema-going.
W&H: There’s still such a robust community for film, as your festival proves.
CS: Absolutely. I think the important thing for us is we are going out to many cinemas across the city, but it is important to us to still have something of scale, to have a screen environment where we can bring big audiences together, because the kind of difference we’re talking about here is the 1600 seats of Odeon in Leicester Square and the next size theater from that is about 400 seats so its really about having something in between those sizes that gives us a really big sense of occasion.
W&H: Wow, that’s exciting!
CS: It is.
W&H: Aside from that wonderful debut of your new venue, I imagine other films will be screened during the year when events are not going on.
CS: No, the venue is a temporary build just for the festival.
W&H: Are you going put it up each year?
CS: We’re piloting it this year to see how it works. The BFI has a long term project to build a new film center and that project is long term. We have a significant investor and we are seeking to build a new film center on the south bank in London, but that is still some ways off.
W&H: What has made you excited for next week?
CS: We’ve just announced today a very full and comprehensive sweep of all the guests and filmmakers who are coming to town, and for me the great excitement always comes from those moments where you’re connecting filmmakers with audiences. I feel very excited about our lineup this year, not only because I feel it’s an exceptional year for film and I say that in a very genuine sense, I feel like in terms of the big films we are seeing a lot more variety in terms of the styles and approaches that filmmakers are taking to their filmmaking. We’re also excited by all the discovery films that we’re playing where a lot of the great risk-taking and innovation in cinema happens.
I’m really proud that we’ve continued our commitment following on from last year’s focus on strong women and [having opened] with “Suffragette,” and then having this symposium the following day with the Geena Davis Institute of Women in Film and TV. Taking the impact that that had and understanding that the festival is not only a great context for presenting the very best in international filmmaking, it’s also a great context for generating debate and raising awareness for particular issues that face our industry and pushing for more change, especially when it comes to considerations around diversity.
W&H: Amma Asante’s film “A United Kingdom” is opening the festival, and I wanted you to comment on that and the fact that she’s the first black director to open or close the London film festival and the fifth woman in sixty years.
CS: First and foremost, Amma Asante has made a terrific film, a film that really continues to prove her as a director with a really impassioned and elegant style. I think it shows her as a director who is committed to telling stories that reveal some of the more difficult moments in Britain’s race relations, and for me it was the film first always, but I was delighted. It was only after we confirmed the film that I discovered she was also the first black filmmaker to open the festival.
Obviously, I have an ongoing commitment to profiling women directors. That is something that myself and the whole program team are very passionate about, so we were very excited to think that we were continuing to open the festival with another British woman director and then also discovering that she was the first black director to open the festival in a year when we’re focusing on black stars, so it’s very, very important. The whole focus on the Black Star program came about very much because the BFI was already developing this celebratory program that would immediately follow the festival championing the achievement of black talent.
W&H: Let’s clarify this — as part of the festival this year you are launching — which will continue after the festival — a program called Black Star, which will include a symposium to talk about issues related, not only to black actors but diversity and actors of all colors in that program?
CS: The focus in terms of the symposium and the talking point for the festival is very much on black talent, and that ties directly into the black star project. But because we’re also very committed to diversity across the piece, and because it’s very important to me not only to have a symposium where we get underneath some of the considerations around who makes choices, who gets to greenlight projects, who gets to make the creative decisions in our industry.
Some of those considerations we will be looking at very closely, with David Oyelowo doing the headline keynote for the symposium, with filmmakers like Amma, Noel Clarke, the legendary Julie Dash, and Barry Jenkins participating in that symposium. Its also very important to us that we don’t only create an environment for debate and discussion but that we also take an action that can illuminate ways you can be tactical and responsive with your own program.
You may have seen, we announced a few days ago the the participants in this year’s network which is the four day lab intensive we do for five producers, five writers, five directors, all of whom have made a super low budget first feature or are on the brink of getting ready to make a first feature film. This year’s cohort has been selected from emerging talent who identify as black, Asian, minority, or ethnic (BAME). This is a collaborative project between the BFI’s film fund and the festival. Lizzie Frankie (of the BFI) and myself, and also Tim Burr who runs the network project, all felt that it was very important to us that we also take that action ourselves of creating opportunities for more diverse filmmakers to get these experiences.
W&H: So, since we focus on women at Women and Hollywood, are there a couple of other women’s films, discoveries or others, that stand out in your mind that you want to highlight?
CS: For us it’s a terrific year with a gala lineup that has films by Amma Asante and by Mira Nair. Andrea Arnold’s film “American Honey” screens as a festival special presentation. Ava DuVernay’s documentary “13th” is screening as our documentary special presentation. We’ve also got two films by women in our official competition selection. We’re very proud to be presenting Kelly Reichardt’s new film “Certain Women.”
Also filmmaker who is less well known internationally, although she has very solid filmmaking career behind her, is Mijke de Jong, the dutch filmmaker who’s film “Layla M.” is having it’s European premiere in official competition. This is an incredibly topical and very, very powerful film about a young woman of Moroccan-Dutch background who is very intelligent and very disenfranchised by what she sees going on in the world around her and rapidly radicalizes. Mijke did a lot of workshopping this character with young women who had gone through this experience and of course it feels very urgent and very real, especially in the contemporary European context.
W&H: Nicole Kidman had a quote recently talking about how film festivals had become so much more important now because it’s so much harder for films to be discovered. What do you think is the role film festivals play in the life that certain films can have after a festival?
CS: I think it’s really varied actually, and it’s kind of different for different elements of the festival in a way. For us, our headline gala selections play very prominently in terms of positioning those films in the award season window, and that obviously has an impact in terms of the profile of the campaign for those films. For us as a festival team, one of the most important things that we do is at the discovery end of the spectrum. I don’t have the figure in front of me but I’m pretty sure we have 64 first feature films at the festival, and to us one of the great roles of the festival is profiling that new talent and giving a platform to them, not only to engage with audiences but to also engage with industry.
I think if you look at our first feature competition lineup this year, there are four films directed by women — “Divines,” “The Levellings,” “Raw,” and “What’s In the Darkness.” That competition platform gives an incredibly important moment to these first filmmakers in terms of shining a light on their achievements. That aspect of what we do is also echoed through this year establishing with our corporate partner IWC, a fifty thousand pound bursary award for first or second time British writers or directors with films in the festival. We recently announced the four shortlisted filmmakers for that bursary, two of whom are British women directors.
W&H: These are important things to note for people — access to capital, which women don’t have.
CS: Right. Both Alice Lowe and Hope Dickson Leach have also been very vocal, with Hope actually being the champion of a group called Raising Films, about raising for awareness for parents, particularly women parents who are in the industry and how childcare also impacts access and opportunity as well.
W&H: It’s a huge issue.
CS: It is. Not that I would personally know, but that in its own way is interesting. I made an early-in-life decision that I wasn’t going to go down that path because I was very focused and very interested in wanting to put work first, but the fact that that already became seeded in my mind when I was in my early 20s says a lot about our culture.
W&H: Absolutely. I think it’s interesting that an actress as prominent as Zoe Saldana talks about not being able to get people to pay for child care but they’ll pay for a yacht or some other kind of absurd thing for a male actor.
CS: (laughs) Yeah, I’m laughing out of hysteria not because I find it genuinely funny.
W&H: I know you’re really busy, so one last question. So, when I look at the big festivals around the world, very few of them are headed by women. What does it mean having a woman running a big festival with 245 movies in it?
CS: I find that one a really hard one to talk about because I guess I just genuinely go in there and do it and by virtue of the fact I am not doing that directly alongside any other festivals its very hard to be comparative about how that experience would be different or not. In terms of my actual experience of doing it, Ifind it harder to reflect on.
In terms of my commitment to profiling women directors, and indeed my team’s commitment. I have a deputy director Tricia Tuttle, festival producer Emily Arnold, who is undertaking this massive new build project that we’re doing, the head of industry and business Anne Marie Flynn — so my senior team is all women. On the program team, two of our three permanent programmers are all women so I do feel that our team commitment to not only creating that space but feeling very comfortable and confident in talking about that space and not feeling that we have to somehow apologize for that interest, that comes very much from having a team of strong women who are committed to not only ensuring that the festival continues to grow but that we put women front and center.
Transcribed by Kate Gardner.
