Wendy Mitchell fjallar um nýafstaðna Stockfish hátíð í ScreenDaily og gerir meðal annars grein fyrir ávarpi Gísla Snæs Erlingssonar, nýs forstöðumanns Kvikmyndamiðstöðvar Íslands, sem opnaði sérstaka dagskrá um helstu stuðningskerfi íslensks kvikmyndaiðnaðar síðasta föstudag.
Mitchell skrifar:
The Icelandic industry was keen to hear the first public talk from Gisli Snaer, the new head of the Icelandic Film Centre, who officially takes up his post this week. Snaer, who had been director of the London Film School, noted that before he unveils any plans for the future of the Icelandic Film Centre, he plans on listening and learning.
“A vision like that is so influential and significant on the lives of the filmmakers in Iceland, that it does require their participation in coming together and sitting down with us and looking at the past 20 years, acknowledging what has been really successful, and also what we can do better. For any kind of institution, the greatest enemy is stagnation and compliance and just being happy with what you have and where you are. It’s a terrific time for me to come in because so much has been built.”
He added: “Just changing for change’s sake is no good. What you want to avoid is to make the institute dysfunctional. You want to actually streamline it. It’s a service institute to serve the people that actually are making the art.”
Snaer added that in dealing with public money, “you are servicing the whole nation, not only the filmmakers. Every day we should be grateful for that and respectful for that. There is a lot of frustration working in a highly regulated area, but there’s a reason for it because you need to be accountable.”
He said he wanted the Centre’s work to reflect the changing world of the film industry. “The old financial model of pre-sales is collapsing. We all know the tremendous change in the production of TV series. Our challenge to participate and assist and help for our industry to adapt to that. I’m not saying that people haven’t done that already, I’m just saying that the institution is indeed to facilitate and help and develop and grow. The change in the market is that you no longer have the medium-budget or low-budget feature film, it’s a nightmare to finance that, not necessarily because the money isn’t there, but because the screens are no longer there, so you don’t get it screened.”
He also noted Iceland’s huge success in production services of big Hollywood films (the rebate is now available up to 35% for larger productions, one reason True Detective came to shoot in the country). “We have to indeed assist and help and manage these [big productions], it’s an ecosystem, one can really not exist without the other. We have a tremendous amount of money coming into the country and contributing to the GDP, but also we have the training ground for an industry. This is really important, if you are only working on one film every 10 years, your skills are not comparable to someone who is actually working on three or four big projects per year, so this is contributing greatly to our industry as well.”
Í greininni er einnig fjallað um ýmsa aðra viðburði Stockfish hátíðarinnar.
