Sydney Film Festival - Time Out Table
The latest Time Out Table, cooked up specially for the Sydney Film Festival's international guests, proved a triumph of the art of dinner partying: the enjoyment of delicious food, wine, and fascinating conversation.
By Ruth Hessey
It was the peak of the 55th Sydney Film Festival - that crisp bright moment in mid-winter when even the gilded cherubs in the State Theatre are gossiping about which is their favourite film, and the festival jury has survived on a diet of lavish lunches, world cinema and spirited debate for what feels like years, not days.
It was clearly the perfect moment for the Time Out Table to convene an evening of handsome Mexican directors, garrulous Canadian documentarians, and the odd New Zealand auteur at a suitably sweet location for some serious cine-networking.
At that point in the festival, there were five more days till the winner of the inaugural "Blue Pavlova", aka the Sydney Film Festival Prize of $60,000, would be revealed. Whispers in the velvet alcoves, and swirling round the marble staircase of the State Theatre confirmed that several of the Time Out Table's international guests were serious contenders for the azure honour. As the evening unfolded, conversation ranged from talk of Maori magical practices to what it was like to stand on the red carpet in Cannes with Natalie Imbruglia.
It was a wet start. The neon light for Subsolo on King Street, in the City, glowed as the rain bucketed down at 8pm. The first guests to descend into Subsolo's gorgeous subterranean cocoon were local producers Rosemary Blight and Ben Grant, who have recently formed Goalpost Pictures Australia with the international sales company Goalpost Film in the UK.
As Subsolo's hostess, owner and manager Iolande Lantelme cracked a few bottles of ice-cold bubbly, Blight and Grant confessed a case of stage jitters for the impending festival screening of their new documentary The Eternity Man, directed by British punk cineaste, Julien Temple. It will screen on the ABC later this year. Nothing a toast or two couldn't deal with (and the screening was subsequently greeted with extended applause).
The vivacious Blight (who has produced Australian features such as Clubland and In the Winter Dark, both starring Brenda Blethyn, as well as many successful television projects) was fresh from toting three feature films to the Cannes Film Festival, and a round of meetings with producers in London.
"It was incredibly good fun!" she said of the glittering French film festival, which can be hard work if you get the cold shoulder. Attending Cannes with someone like Natalie Imbrulgia (the star of Goalpost Picture's Elise, produced by Grant), was quite the fairytale. "We were invited to all the parties in all the castles, and swanned onto all the red carpets," she said. "Of course the minute Natalie left, I was nobody again. But that was funny too."
A fresh influx of wet coats and pink cheeks blew in shortly after, bringing the festival's international guests in from the cold - the analogue-obsessed Guy Maddin and his producer Jody Shapiro from Canada; from Mexico the producers of Lake Tahoe, Fausto Teran and Jaime Ramos; local producer Francisca Wagenfeld, whose latest film Playing For Charlie, also screened at the festival. They were joined by Vincent Ward (director of Map of the Human Heart, River Queen), whose documentary The Rain of Children, also screened in competition and later earned a Special Mention from the jury.
More champagne, olives, and welcomes ensued. After a toast to the goddess of good conversation, the assembled lucky thirteen left the bar area for the Timeout Table itself, positioned in a discreet alcove and lavishly furbished with a centrepiece of Grevillea and Casablanca Lilies.
Those who were entranced by the frozen horses in Guy Maddin's winsome home movie My Winnipeg which screened in competition, will be interested to hear that he confessed to a bout of stage fright at the screening of the film, which he accompanied with a live voice over narration, in the formidably baroque State Theatre. "I've never performed in front of 2,000 people before, and the jetlag was fierce," he confessed. In fact he and Shapiro took two days to get to Australia from NYC.
Producer Fausto Teran talked about the fatal craze for kidnapping which afflicts Mexico City, his hometown. The kidnapping of several friends, he said, motivated him to make tough honest films (he is set to direct his own feature film later this year). Meanwhile Jaime Ramos bemoaned that Lake Tahoe (a deliciously slow and thoughtful mood piece about a death in the family) will never reach a big audience in Mexico because a large chunk of the indigenous population doesn't speak Spanish. This explains at least some of the international success of Mexican arthouse cinema (Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu, Guillermo del Torro, et al): it is oriented to sales and audiences in Europe.
Meanwhile Vincent Ward was engrossed in a fascinating conversation about the power of the village curse - a subject at the heart of his film, The Rain of the Children, which investigates the life of an elderly lady Ward made a film about when he was 21. Returning to the subject over 25 years later, he learned that she had once been a very beautiful Maori princess who was cursed as a result of a feud in her youth, and suffered terribly for the next 70 years. Ward was able to re-enact scenes from her life, which were also pivotal moments in New Zealand's history, using her descendants and living relatives to create a kind of tribal theatre.
As a constant stream of tapas conga-lined from the kitchen, and the delicious wine flowed as easily as the conversation, many new friendships were forged. Wrapping round midnight, the assembled proposed a toast: to the next I Table at the Sydney Film Festival in 2009.
Time Out Sydney would like to thank all those who brilliantly and generously supported the Time Out Table: including Spanish Inquisition wines, the Subsolo restaurant and bar, Jodie McGregor Flowers, The Sydney Film Festival (and especially festival director Clare Stewart), Next Step Publicity, and Wasa Media