attending a film festival

I’ve been speaking about my film to a French audience. Now, that is something you don’t do lightly. The French take the art of cinema seriously.

Fortunately, they had invited me, so they must have seen something they liked. ‘The Road Dance’ was one of a selection from around 100 films considered for the Festival Univerciné Britannique in Nantes, France.

This was my first festival outside of Scotland, outside of the Edinburgh Film Festival, in fact.

The film has featured in festivals in the US, Europe, even England. I haven’t been to any. The director and the cast are a bigger draw, understandably.

And it’s been gathering awards - from the Audience Best Picture choice at the Edinburgh Film Festival to the Jury Best Feature award at the Manchester Film Festival to the Audience Award at the Emden Filmfest in Germany.

The French screening was subtitled rather than dubbed and it was interesting to see the interpretation. I don’t speak French, but I could see that ‘The Road Dance’ was simply “fete’, for example.

The audience didn’t react to some of the incidents in the film in the way that others have, none of the gasps that have been consistent in other screenings. The emotion of the story did move many of them, though.  As elsewhere, there were tears. The warm applause at the end was very gratifying and, given where we were, no little relief.

The questions in the following Q&A were in French, naturally, and translated for me by the excellent Festival Director, Céline Letemple. They were especially impressed that the village in the film is a real place, not a purpose-built set. And they wanted to know how I, as a man, thought I could write a woman’s story. It’s a fair question, to which the answer is that I simply set out to write a powerful story.

‘The Road Dance’ is also now being shown in selected cinemas and Australia and New Zealand.