Speech at Opening Night Reception, January 11, 2006
by Kristine Greenaway, INTERFILM North America

It is a pleasure to be with you here at the opening night reception for this festival in warm, sunny California where there are flowers in bloom.  When I left Montreal yesterday, there were two feet of snow on the ground and sub-zero temperatures!
 
I love films.  Obviously so do you, as you have traveled from throughout the USA to participate in this film festival and seminar.  Because of our shared love of film, we are about to embark together on a four-day voyage into worlds beyond this room and beyond our home communities. 

I use the word “voyage” rather than trip quite intentionally.  The word “trip” implies something we do routinely.  We’ll say, “I’m just going to make a quick trip to the grocery store, dear.”  But the word “voyage” carries with it some of the mystery and sense of the unknown that accompanied the start of expeditions in the 15th and 16th centuries when Europeans deliberately set out to cross the frontiers between the world they knew and what lay beyond.  This four-day film voyage on which we are now embarked is guaranteed to take us beyond what is known to us. At some point we are also likely to find ourselves looking at films about our home countries that will make the familiar seem like new and uncharted territory as well.

As we know from other experiences of travel into unknown places, it is always easier when we have knowledgeable guides with us.  So it is reassuring that Marjorie Suchocki and James Wall will be with us on this voyage.  We also know from experience that one of the joys of travel to unknown places is the encounter with well-informed, curious, and friendly co-travelers, such as those gathered here today.  I look forward to talking with you and learning from you in discussion this evening and throughout the festival and seminar.

It is particularly wonderful to have with us here tonight a film maker who actually creates stories for the screen - Canadian/Iranian director, artist, animator, and “raconteur-extraordinaire”, Masoud Raouf, whose films are part of the festival programme.  Last night as we sat at the bar eating Mexican food, I listened to him switch back and forth between English and Spanish with the restaurant workers.  I know he also works in French in Montreal, so I have a hint of where this world traveler has been and how well-equipped he is for the voyage!  Be sure you talk to him to hear some of his quite remarkable and very courageous story of being a politically-engaged artist and documentary maker. He has dared tell stories some people didn’t want to see and hear. Telling those stories has cost him his homeland and, for a while, his liberty.

Ever since I was a very young child growing up in a small Canadian prairie city, I have been traveling.  One of my earliest memories is of pedaling my tricycle full-tilt boogie to the farthest end of the block in my suburban neighbourhood, imagining I was biking to Regina, the nearest big city and capital of my home province, Saskatchewan.  That early memory of travel to the edges of my known world, which was the curb at the end of that city block, is a metaphor for the rest of my life – a life which has taken me around the world as far as I could go by ferry, train, foot, and hot air balloon. 

Along the way, I have become a professional communicator with a focus on faith and communication.  Film, in turn, has taken me beyond the limits imposed by transportation and time, into eras I never knew or will not live to see.  It has brought me face to face with people I will never meet but whose stories have affected my life.  It has taken me to places inaccessible to me because of my gender, faith, age, or colour. And it has taken me to the red carpet at the Cannes Film Festival as a member of the Ecumenical Jury! 

Voyages of discovery can be exhilarating and they can be uncomfortable. I have been   frightened and disoriented by some films. When I saw Passolini’s The Gospel according to St. Matthew as a woman in my early twenties, I was terrified and literally ran all the way home from the theatre convinced that, like the rich young man in the parable Jesus told, I had no more chance of going to heaven than a camel has of passing through the eye of a needle.

I have also positively tingled with excitement at other films.  The film The Fisher King introduced me to “street people” through a moving and powerful story.  It was an encounter that is like the one we will have here when we see the Australian film Three Dollars which also introduces us to street people.  This is the movie awarded a Mention by the Ecumenical Jury at the Montreal World Film Festival this summer.

Sometimes while watching a truly great film, I have felt a whole range of emotions at once - exhilaration, discomfort, fear, and the tingle of new discoveries.  The line-up of films which Marjorie, Jim, and their colleagues on the selection team have selected for this festival hold the promise of all that.

A special feature of the Whitehead Film Festival this year is that its line-up includes a number of films that have been screened at the Montreal World Film Festival in the past few years. The Montreal World Film Festival is the only competitive film festival in North America that is ranked in category A by the International Federation of Associations of Film Producers (IFAFP) and thus it is the only North American film festival to have an ecumenical jury. That is why I am here to speak to you tonight.  I have served as a member of the Ecumenical Jury at the Montreal festival and attended the Talk Film, Talk Faith seminar there.  A number of these films are well known to me as I have been part of the debate that led to them being singled out for awards or special mentions by ecumenical juries at the festival.

I am here also to celebrate the 50th anniversary of the organization that sponsors Protestant jurors at the Montreal World Film Festival and other major festivals such as Berlin, Locarno, and Cannes. INTERFILM was founded in 1955 in Paris by German, French, Dutch, and Swiss Protestants as a network to link church organizations and individuals concerned with film and theology.   There have been celebrations over the past year in several countries to honour the 50th anniversary and the Whitehead Film Festival seemed to be the perfect place and time for North Americans to recognize the accomplishments of Interfilm over those 50 years.

For fifty wonderful years, film festivals, seminars, publications, and debates supported by INTERFILM have nourished Protestants in Europe and North America who are curious about film and faith.  In 1973, at the Locarno Film Festival in Switzerland, Interfilm and its Catholic counterpart, now called SIGNIS, joined forces to appoint the first ecumenical jury to award a prize at a film festival. In 1979, the first ecumenical jury was selected for the Montreal World Film Festival. 

In North America, INTERFILM is synonymous with the name, James Wall.  Ever since INTERFILM first began as a film education programme here in the 1970’s, Jim has been the central figure and driving force for the organization, serving for many years as its president.  From the beginning, Jim says, education has been central to the activities of INTERFILM NA.  The Whitehead Faith and Film class and the biennial Talk Film, Talk Faith seminar which runs in conjunction with the Montreal World Film Festival serve as models for seminars and discussion groups often set up by people like you when you return to your home communities. Discussions at these seminars also prompt some of us to write articles about film and faith in our church magazines and faith-based journals.

You might want to take note that the next Talk Film,Talk Faith seminar is scheduled to take place in Montreal at the end of August this year.  Contact Canadian Presbyterian pastor Andrew Johnston for details.  This seminar was his brainchild and together with Catholic partners in Montreal, he coordinates this wonderfully stimulating biennial event.  He also works with Jim to nominate Protestants to serve on Ecumenical Juries in Montreal and at other festivals.  Watch out, these seminars at Whitehead and in Montreal serve as well as a training ground for future ecumenical jurors. You might end up on the red carpet at Cannes! 

My own trip to the red carpet starts in the basement of our family’s prairie home where as a 12 year old, I sat one evening engrossed in an episode of the television series, The Man from UNCLE, a series I adored because David McCallum who played Ilya was so cute. My dad joined me, listened thoughtfully to the story, then looked at me and asked quietly “Why is it the bad guys always have German accents?  Why are the bad guys always foreigners?”  He went back upstairs leaving the question just hanging in the air. 

I never saw that show or any other the same way again.  I continued to enjoy watching the series and still enjoyed McCallum’s good looks.  But whenever something happened in the story line that reminded me of my dad’s question, I moved into what I now understand as a critical viewing distance and became conscious of what was happening on the screen.  I found myself asking why - why is that person the villain, why is he portrayed as he is? Dad’s question put me on the road that led me, as I matured, to ask more and more questions about how my faith and values are challenged, contradicted, or illustrated by what I see on television, film, and computer screens.  The question did not put me off watching television nor dampen my enthusiasm for film.  Rather, it deepened my engagement with those stories. 

It led to post-graduate studies in communication in Montreal, to a stint as a television field producer, to involvement in an award-winning international anthology of women’s stories produced for satellite broadcast at the time of the conference in Beijing for women, and to a job with the United Church of Canada as a media awareness trainer.  Through my work there, I became involved in the World Association for Christian Communication and that led me to Geneva where I spent nearly five years as Director of Communications for the World Council of Churches.

It was while I was in Geneva that the phone rang in my office one day. It was Philip Lee of the WACC calling to ask if I would like to serve on the Ecumenical Jury at the Cannes Film Festival.  It took only a split second for me to say yes!  To sit on an ecumenical jury at the world’s pre-eminent film festival.  It was the chance of a lifetime! 

Months later though, as I sat in a dark theatre in the Palais du Festival watching my fifth film in 12 hours, I wasn’t so sure.  Four of the five films the ecumenical jury had seen that day were pretentious twaddle.  But one stood out, Soldades de Salaminas, the luminous story of a young Republican soldier who, during the Spanish Civil War, spared the life of a fugitive Falangist leader in an action of grace that the soldier himself was never able to explain.  It is those moments that make the Cannes Film Festival magic.

Each morning, over instant coffee in a guest house run by a community of nuns, jury members analyzed what we had seen the day before.  Some days I was pushed by the Egyptian, Swiss, and French members of the jury to interpret a film’s images in reference to United Church of Canada’s theology and to define “artistic merit” in North American terms.  Why, they asked me, did I think we could give the prize to Canadian filmmaker Denys Arcand for his film The Barbarian Invasions (the film which went on to win the Oscar for best foreign film)?  Did I really believe, they asked, that a jury that includes Catholics could give an award to a film that portrays euthanasia in ritualistic imagery, a ritual paid for in Arcand’s story by the protagonist’s millionaire son?  Yes, I argued because I believe the best films take us to this intersection between faith and the secular world, to the place where our core values and beliefs are tested.

After days of drinking bad coffee, eating sandwiches on the run, and resisting the lure of the boardwalk and its cast of stars, we awarded the prize of the ecumenical jury to the remarkable Iranian director, Samira Makhmalbaf for her film At Five in the Afternoon.  Just 23 years old at the time, the young Makhmalbaf was already an assured and gifted filmmaker.  Her visually stunning images linger long after the movie has ended. 

The film, whose title comes from a poem by Frederico Garcia Lorca, tells the story of a young Afghan woman who defies her conservative Muslim father to attend a secular school and dreams of becoming president of Afghanistan.  The tragic story of this refugee family is laced with poetry and ends on a cautious note of optimism. 

You might not expect to find a church-sponsored jury awarding a prize at the glittering Cannes Film Festival known for the stars who come to parade their egos on the red-carpeted stairs of the Palais du Festival.  But INTERFILM believes that the presence of ecumenical juries there and at other major festivals, signals to filmmakers that the church recognizes the potential of films to illumine the spiritual dimension of human life.  Indeed, in accepting the award, Makhmalbaf, speaking in Persian, said “Because of the symbolism of this religious award, I wanted to say I am Muslim.  I am Christian. I am Buddhist. I am Hindu.”  For her, she said, the love of God is the love of humankind.

Last summer, as a member of the Ecumenical Jury at the Montreal World Film Festival, I saw Canadian Claude Gagnon’s film Kamataki, an exceptional artistic achievement and masterfully-told story of a young Japanese-Canadian sent to Japan to learn traditional pottery making from his uncle while recovering from attempted suicide. 

The film left audiences buzzing.  Strangers lingered in the theatre to talk about how the young man’s unwilling apprenticeship in Kamataki, the ancient art of firing pottery, turns into an initiation in cross-cultural understanding and self-discovery.  A woman leaned over the seat in front of me and said, “So many different cultural groups live side by side now.  The future depends on us recognizing from stories like this what benefit there is in learning from other cultures.”

I agree. But all too often, great films like this never get the visibility they deserve.  People just don’t hear about them.  So, making those films known is a key element of the INTERFILM mandate. The organization has a website where films that have won ecumenical jury prizes are posted and jurors are expected to make the film they selected known in their home countries.  Apparently, it’s worth the effort.  Publicizing an ecumenical prize does actually make a difference to how many people see a film. 

Claude Gagnon told me this yesterday when, by amazing coincidence, he was on the plane from Montreal to Los Angeles with me.  He said he is thrilled that his film won the Ecumenical Jury Prize in Montreal last summer. Featuring the award in newspaper ads will attract crowds when the film opens in Montreal this March, he says.  When I looked skeptical, he assured me that he had been at the screening in Montreal of another Canadian film, The Novena, which won the Ecumenical Jury prize in Locarno last summer and he was convinced that the theatre was as full as it was and had attracted the informed and engaged crowd that was there, because of newspaper ads which featured mention of the award.  And he says he knows as well that another Canadian film, Gaz Bar Blues, which won the Montreal Ecumenical Jury prize in 2003, and which you saw here last year, also attracted crowds after winning the prize. Currently, the Israeli/French co-production which won the Ecumenical Jury prize in Berlin this year, Go, Live, and Become, is playing in Montreal.  Its newspaper ads too feature the Ecumenical Jury  prize prominently.

Gagnon told me he is really pleased to have been invited to be here at this festival next year to screen Kamataki and talk to you about it.  His story about being at the Berlin festival with a film about a handicapped person and the ensuing discussion with the audience leaves me in no doubt that he is open to lively debate.  He knows this festival encourages discussion with filmmakers and that is a key reason he says he accepted  Marjorie’s invitation.

Life is story.  How we tell it as filmmakers, preachers, writers, and in family reminiscences around the dining room table, reflects our values and what we think of those who are listening.  I now write scripts and I love it.  It is an almost magical process where stories emerge in reaction to the experience of being in places like a 1000 year old pilgrim’s inn watching a modern-day wedding in the courtyard below - experiences that start characters talking and images rolling in my head. Maybe some day soon those images and characters will appear on screen for you to see.  Right now a script for a comic feature length film aimed at “30 somethings” on which I collaborated with my Swiss writing partner is with a producer in Paris. We were pretty excited when he called just before Christmas to say he loves the script and wants to produce it. Our proposal for an animated children’s television series based on indigenous people’s stories is getting enthusiastic both in First Nations communities in Canada and from producers.  And I am about to pitch the script for a feature length family movie that came out of 9/11.

As we work together here as an ad hoc jury during this festival and struggle to come to a common understanding of which film best exhibits artistic excellence in screen play, music, and filming technique and best uses that artistic excellence to tell stories which promote the common good and cultivate a realistic hope of creative transformation, we will come to a new understanding of how to evaluate and understand the intersection between our values and the secular stories on the screen.

If a film were to be made of my life, it would be called Biking to Regina with the tag line From prairie manse to the red carpet at Cannes.  I believe the title for the film of our time together over the next few days here at the Whitehead Film Festival, will be Voyage on the Good Ship Film: The perilous adventures of leaving America.