venice film festival
03/09/2011
photos & words by john best, manager:
Arrive with band in Venice on Friday night for ‘Inni’ film premiere tomorrow, after which we are expected to get up at the crack of doom to go back to our respective cold climates. what are we freakin’ stupid? we are invited to one of (if not the) most beautiful cities in the world on what is effectively a “jolly” and we decide to get the heck out of there as soon as humanly possible? I guess that was a rhetorical question: we clearly are stupid. and having worked with sigur ros for more than ten years, why do i persist in assuming that arranging early hotel departures/interviews is ever going to be anything other than panic-attack-inducingly stressful. i guess i will never learn.
the pleasures of ‘Frankoforto’ airport
still friday night starts well, with an airport pick up like no other, being whisked across the venetian lagoon in one of those wooden speedboats you normally only see in james bond movies. our hotel also has its own boat dock, a short stroll from piazza san marco. everyone gets in their gladrags and we get on another boat to meet our director vincent morisset at a party for fellow french-canadian director jean-marc valle at the so-called lido, which is basically a long beach across the mouth of the lagoon. coincidentally we have 4 or 5 songs in jean-marc’s new movie ‘cafe de flore’, which has had its world premiere a couple of hours before our arrival.
venice is sultry, for which read ‘dank’, and we are soon all wilting slightly within our clobber. we shoot the breeze and quaff the first of many drinks just needing to be drunk this weekend. party is chilled and we relax in the balmy night air, somehow managing to keep this up til sometime close to 4am, eventually making our way back via the excellent all-night vaporettos (water buses) that ply their way around the islands.
photo call!
No-one rises very early, and then we are straight into photo calls and such blah-blah with various god-knows-whos, and then breeze over to another low-key canadian event at which we spy david cronenberg and lots of people really really dressed up. folks in italy in general and at film festivals specifically dress up in a way we seem to have forgotten how in, say, london, new york and reykjavik. there is no requirement to introduce any edge or quirk into proceedings, and most people are dressed to the nines (and plenty to the tens). good luck to ’em I say…from the security of my secondhand tweeds (regretted that in the heat).
post-photo call
with cinema majordomo ray
lido nite life
fan photo call
outside screening
anyway, we had dinner and then swanned over to the screening, where there was a sizeable bunch of sigur ros fan looking people camped out in the cool marble foyer. I find it hard to gauge the impact or worth of doing this kind of festival event. there’s so many films on at all hours of the day and so many people rampantly promoting their wares that it’s hard to read whether anyone give a shit. the organisers however are loveliness itself and everything goes pretty smoothly, despite the fact that kjartan has some issues with the audio levels of the surround system, and orri still finds it impossible to sit through the whole film without feeling self-conscious. afterwards we do a q&a, which, in the manner of these things, feels a bit like a missed opportunity. there are so many things to say about why we made this film, how it differs from ‘heima’ and what we were trying to achieve. and yet at the end I always feel like we’ve hardly scratched the surface. it doesn’t help of course that everyone’s questions and answers have to go through a translator, which slows things down and makes responding stilted.
post screening q&a
speedboat home
still the film looked good and i’m proud of what we’ve managed to put together. it is in my mind a kind of anti-heima. maybe i’ll come back to this topic in the near future, but for the meantime arrivederci.
hey st marks where’s the party?
