After months of delays, the Vancouver film fest’s home base downtown gets set to open
Tom Charity
Sun
CREDIT: Glenn Baglo, Vancouver Sun The Vancouver International Film Centre at Seymour and Davie
CREDIT: Glenn Baglo, Vancouver Sun Files Alan Franey in front of the scheduling board at Vancouver International Film Centre
CREDIT: Glenn Baglo, Vancouver Sun Files Franey on a balcony in the VanCity Theatre
Moving house is never easy, but when your new home has to be designed from scratch, pitched to corporate sponsors, overseen by city bureaucrats and ultimately justified to the tax-payers, then you might be forgiven for wondering why you got into this in the first place.
The last six months haven’t been easy for VIFF festival director Alan Franey. If everything had gone according to plan, he and his team would have been settling into their new offices at the Vancouver International Film Centre at Seymour and Davie in the spring, with the Vancity Theatre opening to the public some time in the summer.
Instead, building delays kept them out until late July. To make matters worse, when they did get in, the Telus lockout meant they were without phones or e-mail for nearly a week during a critical period for the festival.
As recently as the end of August, festival staffers hadn’t even been permitted entry to the theatre, where work continues apace to get everything ready for the festival’s trade forum, Sept. 28-30, and the first public screenings later that week.
As if all that wasn’t enough, Franey found himself smack in the middle of a Kafkaesque nightmare when the city declared a moratorium on corporate sponsorship of public buildings — specifically, permanent exterior signage along the lines of the controversial “TelusSphere” — some two years after he had inked an $800,000 deal with Vancity promising them just that.
That issue will not be resolved in time for the festival, although Franey is exploring what “wriggle room” there might be for temporary signage — a banner, perhaps? — to acknowledge Vancity’s generosity.
Yes, he has had sleepless nights over it, he tells me. “The timing is bad — and we have so many irons in the fire.” Yet he seems genuinely without rancour, and is at pains not only to praise “supportive, patient and cooperative” Vancity, but to express his gratitude to the city too.
His equanimity becomes easier to understand when he takes me for a tour of the theatre, which is a peach. The 175-seat capacity may not sound impressive, but the 33-by-19-foot screen is surprisingly large, and what the venue lacks in “techno Zen” (and junk-food outlets) it more than makes up for in comfort. Seats and legroom are strictly executive class. Projection and sound are state-of-the-art. Film buffs are going to find this place a home away from home.
Back in his office, Franey shows me the festival scheduling board. Not that you could miss it — the patchwork of multicoloured index cards takes up an entire wall. Dates run along the top, theatres (five this year with the addition of the Vancity) along the left-hand axis. Each screening gets its own card. Different program strands are colour-coded, and yellow and green stickers signify the print format and whether the filmmaker will be in attendance.
“We’ve spent a lot of time and money over the years trying to get a computer program to cope with the scheduling, but we’re still doing it by hand like this,” Franey says. “There are just too many imponderables. You can’t program a computer to identify a “Saturday night”-type film. You need to weigh how many seats a theatre has, where it is, when the print is available, if the filmmaker is coming — and you want to avoid clashes with films of similar appeal.”
It takes Franey and his programming team (PoChu AuYeung, Diane Burgess and Mark Peranson) about three weeks to get the schedule right. And if some mischief-maker stole into Mr Franey’s office and swapped the cards around? “Now it’s done we have it transferred to the computer,” he says with a smile. “Two weeks ago, that would have been a problem.”
VIFF is screening about 240 features this year, about the same as the Toronto International Film Festival if you exclude Toronto‘s retrospectives. Yet save for the Canadian titles and a handful of art-house heavyweights from Cannes, there is very little overlap between the two festivals. “Even if you look at Montreal, where they’re in this crazy position of having three festivals within a month, we have completely different films here. I’d say our lineup is as distinctive as it has ever been.”
Why do all Canada‘s film festivals come on top of each other?
“Because we’re all here to serve Canadian filmmaking, and it’s become a harvest crop. Films are completed in time for the fall festivals — to show to North American distributors in Toronto, and to open here before the end of the year to qualify for the Genies.”
He dismisses the inevitable comparison with Toronto, with its Oscar hopefuls and red-carpet premieres. “To complain that we’re not like Toronto would be like complaining that Canadians aren’t American. The only fair comparison you can make is between us and all the other North American film festivals because Toronto is unique.
“VIFF is here to show international films to the citizens of Vancouver. TIFF is a completely different animal, and much more a part of the Hollywood industry.”
VANCOUVER INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL FACTS AND STATS
Total number of films this year: 330
Total number of features: 240
Number of screenings: 567
Number of countries represented: 53
Number of world premieres: 8
Number of Canadian premieres: 59
VIFF attendance in 2004: 151,000
Cost of the new Vancouver International Film Centre and Vancity Theatre: $5 million
Number of seats in the Vancity Theatre: 175
Number of images of a Calgary realtor figuring in artist Donna Akrey’s mandala in the VIFC atrium: More than 1,000
Total number of films showing at the Toronto International Film Festival: 335
Total number of features at TIFF: 256
— Tom Charity
© The Vancouver Sun 2005