What Will You See in Cardiff?

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Posted by: Creative Cardiff

Date: 13 October 2017

Berwyn Rowlands, Festival Director of the Iris Prize - a six-day celebration of LGBT film in Cardiff - reflects on Iris' relationship with the city she calls home. 

When we launched the Iris Prize back in the sepia-tinted summer of 2006, we described Cardiff as its 'host city', and we carried on doing so for the next few years. There were several reasons for this. Though I had organised and run film festivals before, first in Aberystwyth and then in Cardiff, this was an entirely new project: an international LGBT+ short film prize that would enable the winning filmmaker to direct another short here in Wales.

Would Cardiff welcome the Iris Prize with open arms? Was there an audience here for exclusively LGBT+ content? The answer to both these questions – much to my relief – was a resounding 'yes'.

From the start, audiences have been pleasantly surprised by the sheer quality of the films they’ve seen at Iris. Through a process that combines open submissions with nominations from film festivals around the world, we show the year’s very best LGBT+ short films. Our focus has always been on excellence in storytelling, but even as a seasoned festival-goer I’ve been blown away by the variety and standard of stories we’ve seen over the years; from hard-hitting drama to surreal comedy, and from sweet coming-of-age stories to grisly horror. We’re still here 11 years later and each year we meet Iris newcomers from right here in Cardiff.

But our relationship with the city hasn’t always been an easy one! Cardiff is still relatively small (compared to, say, London or Manchester) but it plays host to some major events. Holding the Iris Prize Festival slap bang in the city centre means it will occasionally coincide with a rock concert or rugby international, most significantly the match between Ireland and France during the 2015 Rugby World Cup.

For various practical reasons, Iris is not a 'moveable feast' and so we had two choices: pretend the rugby wasn’t happening and hope for the best, or embrace the fact that we were celebrating LGBT+ cinema only a stone’s throw away from a stadium filled with 70,000 people. We went with the latter.

Luck played a big part of it. By chance, our opening night feature that year was Scrum, a documentary about an Australian gay men’s rugby team, while one of the competing shorts – the brilliantly named Tits on a Bull – was about a rugby team of Maori women. At Cineworld’s BAFTA bar we erected rugby goal posts made out of balloons, while at the Park Inn Hotel (another of our long-standing venues) visiting filmmakers rubbed shoulders (and who knows what else) with visiting rugby fans from Ireland and France.

Many of the city’s hotels were fully booked months in advance and this left us with the dilemma of finding a place for everyone to stay but that’s where Iris’s infrastructure and her relationship with Cardiff, came to the fore.

From the start, the Friends of Iris – a network of people based in and around Cardiff – have provided many of our visitors with hosted accommodation during their stay. One obvious reason for this was budget. Smaller film festivals have to be careful when it comes to expenses. Similarly, if we were unable to put everyone in a hotel room, many of our visiting filmmakers often weren’t in a position to pay for accommodation themselves.

Inviting them to stay with our friends in Cardiff added a personal dimension that many other film festivals simply don’t have, giving those who might be unfamiliar with the city a friendly welcome and even – on occasion – a guided tour of everything Cardiff has to offer.

We were also keen to work with local businesses, including Cardiff’s restaurants and LGBT+ venues, so that as well as bringing world cinema to Cardiff, there’s a sense in which I hope it brings Cardiff to the world.

From early on, Iris has included an award for Best British Short, and we were over the moon when Cardiff documentary maker Jay Bedwani won the prize for his 2013 film My Mother. We won’t always have a local filmmaker in the competition, however, and so we’ve found a number of ways to make sure that talent and stories from Cardiff are given a platform during the festival.

This year, two of our opening night films are documentaries that take a look at LGBT+ subjects here in Wales. Bachelor, 38 introduces septuagenarian Cardiff boy Bryan Bale, who talks about his experiences as a gay man living through the seismic era in which homosexual acts were decriminalised.

Meanwhile, Côr Blimey follows the South Wales Gay Men’s Chorus as they compete in the Cornwall International Male Voice Choir Festival – and it really doesn’t come much more Welsh than a documentary about a male voice choir!

South Wales has become something of a hub for TV and film production in recent years, with Doctor Who and its various spin-offs, not to mention Casualty and even some scenes for the sequel to Jurassic World being filmed nearby. Many aspiring filmmakers come here to study and work, and utilising that talent has been an important part of Iris since day one. Though our winning filmmakers have hailed from as far afield as the USA, Australia and Israel, the films they’ve made were shot in and around Cardiff using a predominantly local crew, many of whom were graduates or still studying at colleges such as the University of South Wales.

Meanwhile, the Producers Forum, which takes place during the festival, provides an opportunity for filmmakers to network and take part in discussions about fundraising and production. Our Education Day allows secondary school students from Cardiff and across Wales to watch some of the films showing during the festival and to meet the artists who made them. This has expanded in recent years to include an outreach project where we help local organisations to produce short films of their own, learning something about the filmmaking process and gaining a greater understanding of LGBT+ issues.

This year’s programme includes 47 short films and 10 feature films from 20 different countries. The stories on screen will be told in languages as varied as Brazilian Portuguese, Mandarin and Xhosa.

And for the first time ever we have a previous winner returning to Iris with another short. Brendon McDonall won the 2014 Iris Prize with his film All God’s Creatures, and he came to Cardiff the following year to take part in the 2015 festival and make the BAFTA Cymru-nominated Spoilers. His new film, The Dam, is something very special indeed but the level of competition this year is incredibly high, so all bets are off.

In another Iris first, we’re moving our awards show from the confines of a movie theatre or function room to the Depot for the inaugural Iris Carnival. As well as the awards, there’ll be performances by local musicians, including Lily Beau and Climbing Trees, and a headline appearance by M People’s Heather Small who last visited Cardiff to perform at Pride in 2012.

Iris began by calling Cardiff her host city, but 11 years later it feels very much like home, which is why in 2017 we’re asking our audiences: “What will you see in Cardiff?”