My First Cannes Film Festival

My first trip to Cannes was 25 years ago. I arrived a week before the festival was scheduled to open. I strolled around the quiet town, lazed on the beach and took the train to nearby cities — Nice, Antibes, and Monaco — all beautiful places.

Around Cannes, things changed dramatically as the global film circus rolled into town. It got crowded. The locals fled. Giant billboards advertising Hollywood’s latest offerings cluttered the boardwalk. Fences went up. Security arrived. You can imagine what it’s like this year.

I was there because my first feature was selected to open the Critic’s Week, one of the 7 films chosen from first and second features around the world. This is the icing on the cake for a low-budget independent filmmaker. It was amazing, and you can’t compare it to anything else.

I have lots of memories, but two important things were that my Mom was able to go, and I got a great review in Variety:

When the festival finished, I stayed on for another week. I watched the signage come down, the crowds go home, and the locals return to the little town they enjoy for 50 weeks a year.

Cannes is a nice place to visit, but for two weeks every year, it’s a crowded madhouse.

I loved it.

You’ve been warned!

 

 

The Impact of Architecture and Industry on the Individual

I first drove into the city of Trail, British Columbia, in 1986. The huge smelter was roaring; the air was swirling with smoke: and the radio news was in Italian. I had lived in British Columbia all my life but I’d never experienced anything like this: I felt lost, frightened and small. I was a stranger here.

The smelter in Trail sits atop a hill overlooking the town. It reminded me of the Acropolis of Athens, but re-imagined as a post-industrial nightmare. Being curious, I signed up for a tour through the factory, venturing down into the bowels of the operation where hot molten steel was processed and poured. The guide spoke about the environmental damage to the surrounding area, the “heavy water” plant that contributed to the making of atomic bombs, and the fact that Trail was on Hitler’s top ten ‘hit list’ of North American cities.

The Smelter in Trail, British Columbia

 

I happened upon this notorious little town by accident. I was taking a different route back to Vancouver, returning from a film shoot in the mountain town of Nelson where I’d been a director-observer on Scottish director Bill Forsyth‘s film Housekeeping. I was enrolled in the Masters Film Production program at the University of British Columbia and I had a goal to make a feature film for my thesis. Driving through the streets of Trail, I knew I had found the setting.

I returned with my actors and crew in the summer of 1989. We shot black and white 16mm film and re-photographed every finished frame to 35mm. The result is rich and grainy, like looking at the world through densely-particled air.  The Grocer’s Wife went on to premiere at the Toronto International Film Festival in 1991 where it was recognized with a special jury citation for Best Canadian Film. In 1992, it was selected to open the International Critic’s Week at Cannes.

The Architectural Intention of my Compositions

At a Q+A following a matinee screening at Cannes, a young French cinephile (who couldn’t have been older than 15) asked me ‘to explain the architectural intention of my compositions.’ I had done extensive research on this topic, but it wasn’t something I thought would translate in my film. I recounted my first impressions of Trail and how the smelter was built at a site that would have have historically been used for sacred religious architecture, like the Acropolis or Le Corbusier’s chapel at Ronchamp, France.

Religious architecture, in the Canadian context, diminished in scope and scale as the country expanded to the west. In Montreal, you see grand church steeples, domes and basilicas throughout the city. In Vancouver, the historic churches are few and tiny in comparison.

Technological Nationalism

Western Canada was settled by the construction of the national railroad and the pervasive spread of industrial mechanization. Factories replaced churches as the center of towns; shift whistles replaced church bells; smokestacks replaced steeples. The absence of religious architectural landmarks and the re-organization of communities around machines changed the dominant values of society and created new psychological distortions: alienation, isolation and normlessness.

I could never truly capture my first impression of discovering Trail, but it had such an impact that I had to try. The Pacific Cinematheque will be screening a DCP of the 35mm print, courtesy of the National  Library and Archives, as part of their History of Film in British Columbia program on April 3rd.  Screening time and info.