Bristol Film Festival reveals packed summer progranne

Bristol Film Festival‘s summer season of events continues in July, with a series of screenings at The Mall Gardens, ranging from classics like Some Like It Hot to more modern hits, including La La Land and Knives Out. We took the opportunity to grill founder and festival director Owen Franklin about the hugely successful event’s past, present and future

You’ve been running Bristol Film Festival for 10 years now. What have you learned about the tastes of local audiences in that time?

There’s no such thing as a set demographic! Bristolians have wonderfully eclectic tastes and it’s great to see a diverse range of ages and backgrounds across the events. For example, if you’d assume that 30s-40s black-and-white films attract older audiences and cult ‘video nasty’ horrors appeal more to students/millennials, you couldn’t be much more wrong – those two examples seem to overlap in terms of audiences massively, for some weird and wonderful reason. I think the hallmark of any classic film is that it has that transcendental appeal.

Knives Out: one of the highlights of the summer programme

How many people are involved behind the scenes in running a typical festival event?

The core admin team behind day-to-day running of the Festival is pretty small, but obviously the numbers rise whenever there’s an event. Even at an established venue, there will be event crew and AV technicians on top of the venue’s staff. When we’re at a venue that we build from the ground up – like the Summer Season in the Mall Garden, for example – it can be dozens of people involved in the build-up and running.

What would you say has been the best/most rewarding Festival event?

You can’t expect me to single out just one! Our first event post-pandemic was a long weekend at Redcliffe Caves; after 18 months without an event, it felt incredible to be back at one of Bristol’s most unique locations, and we were completely sold out, so the support was overwhelming. I can’t remember half the films we screened, just the feeling of gratitude that there was still so much interest and goodwill during those strange times. Also, convincing the wonderful Paul McGann to join us for a 30th anniversary screening of Withnail & I back in 2017 was particularly surreal; he’s a good sport and it was truly special to have him there, adding to the film’s hilarity by sharing his memories of making it.

Festival Director Owen Franklin introduces an event

Some of the strands, such as Horror in the Caves and wine tastings paired with screenings, have been instant hits. But has anything not worked as well as you’d hoped? 

In the first year of the Festival, we tried combining food with the wine tasting nights, which didn’t seem to land; however, we’ve re-introduced it recently and it’s been a hit, so perhaps it was just too early, before we’d built a big enough audience. Sometimes I’m privately disappointed that a particular film that I love hasn’t sold very well, sometimes a beloved smash hit film flops, only to sell out a couple of years later! Equally, sometimes the more niche selections utterly surpass expectations (for example, the mind-boggling indie sci-fi Primer on a rainy school night in January), so it’s best to just go with the flow…

Primer – exceeded expectations

If someone has never been to a festival event before, where would you suggest they start to get a flavour of what to expect?

The first thing to do would be to remedy this by joining us on 4-6th July at the Summer Season! More generally, our Vintage Screenings (wine tastings/film nights) at Averys Wine Cellars are an extremely popular year-round series, and also one of our autumn weekends in Redcliffe Caves (cult classics in September, horror in October) really encapsulate our spirit of pop-up cinema in amazing venues.

You use a lot of non-traditional venues for screenings. Has it been difficult persuading them to take part?

Quite the opposite! I’ve had to revise my original ‘venues bucket list’ so many times, since we’ve worked with so many venues over the past decade. Very occasionally we have to pass on a venue because of logistical reasons (e.g. limited sightlines) and it’s always such a shame – part of the fun is working out how to transform a venue into a cinema for the day, and how to give it its own character and pair a worthy film with it.

What ambitions do you have for the future of the festival?

There are always ideas for new venues and events bubbling away in the background. More generally, I hope that people who join us for one of their favourite films will go onto discover films they haven’t seen at future events that we host – at the heart of everything we do is the fervent belief that great cinema is best enjoyed in company, and that being part of an audience is a key component of movie magic.

Maun pic: Paul McGann and Richard E. Grant in ‘Withnail and I’ – one of the Festival’s best events, according to founder Owen Franklin.