Sunday was a busy day at the GFF, with more short film selections to enjoy and bigger crowds than ever attending the premières and special events. Stuart was in early at the GFT to hang up some photographs from his recent Murder Ballads exhibition in the upstairs bar, to complement the following day's film about the work of Nick Cave, The Good Son. Nick has one of the pictures himself and says he thinks they're beautiful; unfortunately the bar is off limits to the public much of the time during the festival, as it's being used as a green room, but if you ask nicely you should be able to get in to see them.
Hanging pictures takes longer than you might think, so Stuart only just had time to finish the task before running down to certain expensive hotel to await the arrival of special guest James Earl Jones. Jones is currently appearing in Cat On A Hot Tin Roof on the London stage and was visiting on his only day off, which meant he had to travel both ways on the same day. Of course his plane was late, but he remained in jovial mood, and politely requested that Stuart refrain from taking any pictures of his bum as he climbed backwards out of the people mover. He even posed for a picture with the doorman, a big fan, before hurrying inside to freshen up before he was due at the GFT.
With such a long and diverse career, Jones has a lot of fans, and they were queueing all the way along Rose Street to get to see him. The event itself, at which he chatted to a live audience alongside his son, Flynn, was sold out. Everybody reported having a fantastic time. Though Jones was hesitant when one fan (actually Legacy director Thomas Ikimi) asked permission to do his Darth Vader impression, it turned out to be so good that everybody requested to hear more. We'll be bringing you in-depth coverage of the event, along with some exclusive pictures, later in the week.
A few hopeful fans were still hanging around when I arrived at the GFT in the evening to see The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo. It was another sold-out screening, with festival director Allison Gardner declaring it one of her favourite films of the festival and sulking because she had to work so couldn't hang around and watch it again. It's a very long film, almost two and a half hours, yet it never slows down of seems episodic - there's plenty of story to fill the running time and it grips throughout. Fans of the book will not be disappointed.
The problem with sold out screenings is that it can take a long time to get people in and out of them. I had to wait twenty minutes afterwards for the crowd to thin so I could get down the stairs. One staircase was blocked by people queueing to see Michael Moore's latest work, Capitalism: A Love Story. Peter Mullen was among them, looking forward to the film; one fan who had hoped for an autograph was disappointed, but the actor tends to spend a lot of time at the festival each year, so patience should be rewarded.
Whilst I was in the film, poor Stuart was still working, but at least he got a sit down watching Space & Light Revisited in the CCA. This unusual event consisted of two shot-for-shot identical films of the same building - St Peter's Seminary at Cardross - made by Murray Grigor, one in 1972 and one last year. Since the first film was made, the building has fallen into disrepair, so a shot of beautiful wood panelled ceiling was in one instance matched by a shot of open sky. This event seemed to be one of the most popular things at the festival so far, with everyone who attended really excited about - both Murray's beautiful camerawork and his evocative if largely silent story.
The following day Stuart was busy at the Gallery of Modern Art, helping photographer and poet Sandra Alland take down an exhibition of our work there. I met them afterwards for coffee and gossip about last year's Edinburgh Film Festival, where Sandra and her partner made quite a splash at the closing party. Stuart couldn't stay long as he had to scoot to a screening of The Good Son. This was introduced by the filmmakers, Iain Forsyth and Jane Pollard, "some guy with a beard and a woman without a beard," who apparently seemed a bit lost, having blundered into the whole fame thing by accident, but whose work made a great impression on a crowd of Nick Cave fans. The first part of the show was a series of short films and music videos they'd made with Nick Cave, interspersed with excerpts of him reading from his recent book The Death Of Bunny Munro, followed by a 40 minute film about the album The Good Son with interviews with lots of those involved in making it. This is part of a series called Do You Love Me Like I Love You which will look at each of Cave's albums in turn. Unfortunately not everybody seemed familiar with the Biblical parable on which the album was based, several people confusing it with the story of Cain and Abel and one woman even suggesting it was about Bobby and JR Ewing.
I stuck around in the coffee house for a little longer before seeing Sandra and her partner off onto a train with a rolled-up piece of artwork at least three metres long - I'm not sure how they got it through the doors. In Cineworld I had time to grab a pannini and take a look through the in house magazine, which featured at least two reviews by writers who clearly hadn't been to see the films in question. I'm sure if a whole school had burned down in Youth In Revolt I would remember it; its modest hero could never have imagined doing anything that spectacular. The way stories mutate through this kind of misreporting is something I find reminiscent of the old oral traditions that gave us some of our best-loved folk tales. It's charming in its way, though annoying if somebody is getting paid for it.
On the lift in the way up to see Romania-set vampire film Strigoi I bumped into festival director Allan Hunter, who introduced me to his two companions, director Faye Jackson and her producer husband Rey Muraru. Both were clearly excited about the screening. It wasn't sold out but there were few seats spare. The film itself is rather odd, veering between quirky horror, a playful exploration of folkloric traditions, and a political thriller. It uses the (rather differently played) tropes of vampirism to explore the legacy of the Ceausescus and the various political movements that have attempted to dominate in a country where peasant concerns have remained the same for centuries. As for vampirism itself "you assume the old traditions have died down, and then every now and again you see something in the news about a body being dug up somewhere and you realise they haven't," said Jackson. After the film she did a brief Q&A and then she and I escaped into the lobby for a chat, so we'll be bringing you more on that later.
With ticket sales now well over 20,000, this year's festival is proving a roaring success. One woman said that Strigoi was far and away the best film she'd seen there, but with so much variety, there's really something for everyone. We'll be keeping you up to date on all the latest right here at Eye For Film.
