Fears about whether the 2014 Winter Olympics would affect attendance at this year’s Victoria Film Festival have proven unfounded.
Attendance has actually risen since the festival began on Feb. 7, when the opening ceremonies in Sochi were broadcast.
Revenues are up three per cent over last year, with 30 sold-out screenings setting a box-office record, organizers said.
“I think people have PVRs, and I don’t think our core audience is that sports-minded,” said festival director Kathy Kay. “The Super Bowl never really affected us, either.”
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In a rare departure, the Super Bowl didn’t coincide with the 10-day festival that traditionally starts the first Friday in February, which this year fell on Feb. 7.
Demand was so high for two hot tickets — Village at the End of the World and Cyber-Seniors — that second screenings were booked. Cyber-Seniors re-screens today at 4 p.m. at the Vic Theatre, with director Saffron Cassaday in attendance.
While filmgoers requested extra showings of other films, the schedule has been too packed to accommodate them, said communications director Eva Mitic.
“The good news is we’re able to bring some back later,” she said, noting Village at the End of the World will open Feb. 20 at the Vic, followed by the return of Alan Partridge, as well as Good Vibrations and The Stag, two crowd-pleasers in a wave of amusing Irish comedies including Life’s a Breeze.
Today’s highlights include Andrew Naysmith’s homegrown doc Tide Lines; the Ugandan civil-rights documentary Call Me Kuchu; and the Laotian charmer The Rocket.
Cinephiles seeking libations with their film fare might also want to consider today’s Sips ’n’ Cinema Beer event, a 2 p.m. screening of Putzel followed by tastings of local brews at Smith’s Pub.
Festival Flashbacks
This being the Victoria Film Festival’s 20th anniversary, it’s not surprising film buffs have been tripping down memory lane.
Kay found herself flashing back to 1998, when she entertained Hollywood’s king of kitsch John Waters (Pink Flamingos, Hairspray).
“He wanted to see the house his mother grew up in on Rockland Avenue,” she said, recalling with a laugh how Waters had the address for Government House by mistake. Waters called his mother on Kay’s cellphone, but she was out for dinner in Baltimore, his hometown. While they waited for mom’s callback, the white-trash connoisseur gleefully asked Kay to show him “the bad parts” of Victoria.
“I took him down Yates Street, where there were lots of empty stores back then, and through Esquimalt, but he was disappointed,” she recalled. “He said, ‘This looks like most of middle America!’ ”
Other memorable past guests include cinematographers Laszlo Kovacs, John Bailey and Jaws shooter Bill Butler, and E.T. editor Carol Littleton.
Personal highlights include conversations with Kovacs passionately recalling the magic of Vancouver Island’s light while shooting Bob Rafelson’s 1970 classic Five Easy Pieces here; hanging out with actor Barry Pepper, Charles Martin-Smith and Capote co-producer Rob Merilees, the close-knit collaborators who said they regarded the festival as an ideal place to comfortably reunite.
“I couldn’t believe it. I was sitting with Toad [Martin-Smith’s nerdy character in American Graffiti] at the Bard and Banker!” recalled dumbfounded Times Colonist sportswriter Cleve Dheensaw.
Another personal plus was befriending Keith Carradine, a true gentleman whose affability matched his acting talent, when he and Dirk Benedict of Battlestar Galactica fame came in 2001 for the world première of their dark comedy Cahoots.
Coincidentally, a memorable celebratory dinner hosted by then-proprietor Harry Loucas with Carradine, Benedict and friends including actor-artist Duncan Regehr and Cowboy Junkies bassist Alan Anton was held at James Bay’s Harbour House, the same place British filmmaker Don Boyd (Twenty One) created another highlight a year later.
Boyd was here for the première of the late Richard Harris’s final film My Kingdom, in which Harris played an aging Liverpool crime lord. The genial director recalled the legendary, cancer-stricken Irish actor’s final departure from his longtime home at London’s Savoy Hotel shortly before his death age 72.
“He raised himself and with a twinkle in his eye he said, ‘Don’t eat the food!’ ” laughed Boyd, recalling Harris’s remark to onlookers while paramedics wheeled him out of the posh hotel.
And although Larry Weinstein was missed this year (he was at the Berlin festival), the co-director of Our Man in Tehran was here in spirit.
“Larry’s talked about this festival so much we feel like we already know you guys,” said his co-director Taylor, here with Ken Taylor, Canada’s former ambassador to Iran, and producer Elena Semikina.
Weinstein is perhaps the most significant example of a filmmaker whose works-in-progress the festival has consistently launched.
The Emmy Award-winning filmmaker and Rhombus Media co-founder first test-screened his documentaries about Beethoven, Mozart and Harold Arlen; and Mulroney: The Opera, his deliciously irreverent $3.75-million musical satire on Canada’s 18th prime-minister, here.
A highlight for Weinstein was the year Auschwitz survivor George Brady sparked a standing ovation after making a surprise appearance after a screening of Inside Hana’s Suitcase, Weinstein’s moving documentary on Brady’s sister of the title, the young Czech Jew who died in a concentration camp at age 13.