Northern Greats: Manchester International Film Festival

This month, Manchester will again be enveloped in a sea of creativity as its biennial International Festival brings acclaimed musicians, artists and theatre-makers to the city. There’s one art form missing from this cultural blitz, however: cinema. Aiming to fill the moving-image chasm is Manchester International Film Festival, which will run in and around AMC in the Great Northern Warehouse from 10-12 July.

This is the festival’s inaugural year but its organisers have big ambitions, stating on their website that the festival "will become a world leader within the international filmmaking community” and that its objective “is to champion great storytelling that translates brilliantly on to screen.” We sat down with director of operations Neil Jeram-Croft and director of programming Al Bailey to find out more.

The Skinny: Why did you want to start the festival, and what kind of festival did you want to create?

Neil Jeram-Croft: We’re filmmakers ourselves and we’ve never really understood why there wasn’t an international film festival here in Manchester, so we just thought, why not?

We talked about whether we should go niche, and we decided to steer clear of that. There are specialist film festivals here in Manchester already; there’s ¡Viva!, HOME’s Spanish festival, there’s Grimm Up North, but there’s never been a fully fledged mainstream film festival here, and that’s what we wanted to bring. The programme’s full of independent films, but they’re not arthouse, as such. There’s a broad appeal to our selection and that’s what we really wanted.

How did you go about selecting the programme?

Jeram-Croft: Other festivals like to scour the globe for films, go to Sundance and try to get as many films from there as possible, then go to Sydney and get films from there. We wanted them to all come from submissions. Each filmmaker payed us a small fee to submit their film for us to consider, and for us to then give half of the space away to films that haven’t specifically asked to be in our festival seemed wrong. We wanted to go with the strongest films we had from our submissions, and luckily they were really strong.

Al Bailey: I’ve basically been in a dark room since October. The remit was story, story, story. We were looking for great stories, and the production value, etcetera, came after that.

Apart from great films, what else goes in to making a successful festival?

Bailey: I think creating a sense of occasion. For example, for the screening of Buskin Blues, which is a film about busking, we’re working on something where we’ll bring buskers to the screening to create a bit of an atmosphere. It’s about theming whatever you’ve got going on onscreen with something around the screening to make it special.

Jeram-Croft: What’s great for us this year is that we’re just in the AMC, not in five different screens spread across the city. It’s very easy to lose your identity when you’re that spread out. And the Great Northern is such a great location in terms of the bars and restaurants that are there, so it’s all going to be very contained, which is brilliant for us.

What’s the future for the festival?

Bailey: Make something sustainable. We want to improve year on year and build a network, a filmmaking community. There is a filmmaking community in Manchester already, but some things are so underground you have to be a mole to know that they’re going on and that’s not what we’re all about.

Jeram-Croft: We want it to be an annual event that’s looked forward to and that the people of Manchester can take pride in.

Bailey: But it’s not going to be some back slapping exercise saying, "Look how great Manchester is at making films." It’s more about bringing great films to Manchester. Don’t get me wrong: we have films in the programme from Manchester filmmakers, but they’re there because of their quality.

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Manchester International Film Festival takes place 10-12 July at the Great Northern Warehouse, Deansgate, Manchester
For full listings and ticket information, go to maniff.com
thegreatnorthern.com | @gnwarehouse

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