Last Wednesday before the Atlantic Film Festival’s screening of
Coco Chanel & Igor Stravinsky, a short film by Andrew
Stretch had its fest premiere. Last February the Halifax filmmaker
entered a competition sponsored by AFF, Alliance Française and
the French Consulate. The prize: Sending young directors to the Cannes
Film Festival. Winner Stretch, along with 16 other international
filmmakers, journeyed to France, gear in tow.
Inspired by Phillip Hoffman’s ?O,ZOO!, which explores “the
trust that one puts in the narrator and how conditioned we are as
viewers to formal film conventions,” Stretch set out to show the Cannes
that gets neglected on celebrity news pages. “I shot with my video
camera the way I would normally shoot still photographs—I ended up
with a large collection of these moving tableaux,” he says, capturing
outdoor market scenes, street performers and avid fans.
“The most fascinating part of Cannes during the festival has little
to do with films or celebrities,” says Stretch, who just finished a
video for Ruth Minnikin. “It’s the outer layer, the spinoff that
happens when you triple a city’s population—the crazy ideas that
people try to get noticed, to make money. It’s really inspiring to be
surrounded by this belief that anything is possible.”
This article appears in Oct 1-7, 2009.