Filmmakers would like to think their work is art. And it is, of course, but the people paying for it will tell you it's a business.
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The economics of the film industry mean films with the best chance of making a return for their distributors and the cinemas screening them will get seasons at commercial cinemas, and as our cinemas become less arthouse and more shopping-mall, that means films in English, preferably from the US or Britain, and with known stars.
This has created a secondary commercial opportunity for film festivals to provide the market with everything else – one-off or limited screenings of films, often in a foreign language, with niche market interest.
This market is currently well mined. Last weekend alone Canberra played host to a Greek, a Japanese and an Iranian film festival, in three different cinemas.
A British film festival is something of an anomaly among these two models – English-language films, all of them strong and likely to obtain commercial screenings, but brought together into a season that celebrates itself. The commercial potential should make its programmers salivate.
The 2015 BBC First British Film Festival opens at Palace Electric Cinemas on Tuesday October 29, a celebration of all things British, and opening with the Michael Caine picture Youth (Tuesday, October 29 at 7pm, with drinks from 6.30pm and followed by an after-party at Monster for a $50 price tag).
I was fortunate enough to preview a number of the films in the program, and am happy to report they are all enormously strong works.
I was interested in watching The Legend of Barney Thompson (November 4, 8.45pm, November 10, 6.30pm) as it marks the feature film directing debut of The Full Monty actor Robert Carlyle, but what hooked me was a mesmerising performance from Emma Thompson, completely unrecognisable as the kind of woman who might start a fight in a bar with you at 4am if you happened to be in a particularly unsavoury part of Glasgow.
Quiet barber Barney Thomson (Carlyle) accidentally stumbles into a murder, his life further complicated by his impossible mother (Thompson).
Regular ABC viewers will love seeing one of their favourite shows Spooks up on the big screen with Spooks: The Greater Good (November 6, 8.45pm) with Game of Thrones' Kit Harington in the lead role. He's great to watch, and the supporting cast includes the likes of Jennifer Ehle and Peter Firth. It is nice to imagine a life for Kit Harington after the demise of Jon Snow, and here he shows nice range.
Of the films I didn't get a special little sneak peek at, I'm most excited about Elstree 1976 (November 12, 8.30pm), a documentary that follows a few of the lesser players in the global phenomenon that was Star Wars, from their work on the set in 1976 through their subsequent lives and the way they have been shaped by their involvement in the film.
The brightest star on this festival line-up has to be Suffragette (October 31, 6.15pm and November 8, 4.15pm), starring Helena Bonham Carter, Carey Mulligan and Meryl Streep, about the women who fought for equality in Britain and which has seen its own share of front page stories since its release overseas, with contemporary women's rights movements using the film's red carpet events to spotlight how little progress has been made in a century in many ways.
For me, the best programming in this year's British Film Festival is the retrospective season of love films from across the 20th century with a representative film for each decade – not filmed in each decade, but set in each decade – with The Go-Between (November 7, 1.45pm) representing the fin-de-siecle and Four Weddings and a Funeral (November 13, 8.30pm) the 20th century's final decade.
One of my all-time favourite films, My Beautiful Laundrette (November 5, 9pm), represents the 1980s. Laundrette is Stephen Frears' subversive love story about a young Pakistani Brit and his fascist former schoolmate, played by a young and beautiful Daniel Day-Lewis.
The British Film Festival's love season also nicely complements the Canberra International Film Festival's Peter Finch retrospective, screening across the road at the National Film and Sound Archive at the same time, with Palace screening Finch's daring performance as a bisexual man in Sunday, Bloody Sunday (November 1, 6pm).
The festival closes on Wednesday, November 18 with The Man Who Knew Infinity (November 18, 7pm), starring Jeremy Irons and Dev Patel, a retelling of mathematical genius Srinivasa Ramanujan's (Patel) life.
Finally, a word on allowing sponsors naming-rights for your festival. Until last year, this was simply the British Film Festival, but is now called the BBC First British Film Festival. Folk like me whose mortgage won't let them afford Foxtel may not be immediately aware that BBC First is the name of one of the BBC channels on cable television. This is a season of British films, but not necessarily films from the BBC, and not necessarily films that aired on the BBC first, or will. And it isn't the first season of this festival, it is the third. I was much less confused with the Lavazza Italian Film Festival. Film and coffee are more readily told apart.
The BBC First British Film Festival 2015 is at Palace Electric Cinemas from October 29 to November 18. See: palacecinemas.com.au.
