Delta Sponsors the Raindance Film Festival for the Third Year Running
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DELTA SPONSORS THE RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL FOR THE THIRD YEAR RUNNING This is the third year running of the partnership between Delta Air Lines and Raindance, continuing to support emerging filmmakers and independent film. Last year, Delta sponsored the attendance of selected filmmakers, who travelled from the USA to London in order to support their screenings at the Raindance Film Festival. One such filmmaker was Alex Holdridge, director of the stylish romance In Search of a Midnight Kiss. Together with producer Seth Caplan and cast members Scoot McNairy and Sara Simmonds, Alex attended the screening of the film, which was such a success at the festival that its screening led to the film being picked up by Vertigo Films (Joe Strummer: The Future is Unwritten, Shrooms) for UK distribution. The film has since reached a larger audience with screenings at mainstream cinemas. Other guests sponsored by Delta included Hollywood movie star and icon Michael Madsen, who came to promote the new mockumentary Being Michael Madsen, along with director Michael Mongillo. The Reservoir Dogs star attended the screening, and participated in a special masterclass focusing on his acting career. Also supported was Azazel Jacobs, whose independent hit The GoodTimesKid went down a storm with Raindance audiences. For the second year running Delta supported the Raindance Director in Residence, which last year saw cult Japanese director Ryuichi Hiroki attend the festival to host screenings of three of his films. In Search of a Midnight Kiss director Alex Delta sponsored the Best UK Short award, won by Tom Tagholm, director of The Truffle Hunter, a story about a Holdridge and crew struggling truffle hunter making the discovery of a lifetime, with devastating results on his relationship with his pig. DELTA AT A GLANCE Delta is the world’s leading transatlantic carrier, linking more European cities to the US than any other carrier. Delta also serves the most cities in the US with flights to 48 states. From the UK, Delta offers non-stop flights with convenient connections to over 200 cities in the US and beyond: Delta flies to more worldwide destinations than any airline with Delta and Delta Connection flights to 312 destina- tions in 61 countries. To Latin America and the Caribbean, Delta offers 393 weekly flights to 47 destinations. LGW – ATL LGW – CVG LHR – ATL LHR – JFK MAN – ATL MAN – JFK EDI – JFK delta.com SIXTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 11 AS FAYE DUNAWAY VISITS RAINDANCE FOR THE FIRST TIME, ELECTRIC SHEEP’S VIRGINIE SÉLAVY RETRACES HER CAREER IN FILM ‘Bonnie Parker was the first role, the one that was closest to me in many ways. She was just this small-town southern girl, coming out of nowhere, hungry and wanting to get ahead, wanting to do something meaningful, wanting to succeed. She had a kind of poetry in her soul. She’s a part of me to this day’ Interview by Mike Sager, Esquire, August 1999 INCE MAKING HER cinema debut with Hurry Sundown restlessly paces about the room, brooding and sensual, instantly conveying in 1967, Faye Dunaway has appeared in over 60 feature the oppressive boredom of small-town life. When she sees Clyde trying to films, worked with renowned directors such as Roman steal her mother’s car, she upbraids him from her bedroom window, clearly Polanski, Arthur Penn and Sidney Lumet and starred naked through the frosted glass, in a brilliantly daring scene. She clumsily opposite some of Hollywood’s most illustrious leading rushes down the stairs while hastily fastening her dress, but when she men, including Jack Nicholson, Steve McQueen and comes out of the door to meet Clyde she’s all sass and tease. In that one SRobert Redford. And yet, in spite of everything she has achieved since scene, Dunaway has already vividly conveyed the complexity of the char- then, her first lead role in Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde (1967) remains acter, her beguiling mixture of sexual confidence and country girl naïvety. her magnum opus, not only one of her most affecting and memorable per- Bonnie Parker was a new breed of female character, and it was one the formances but the one that made her a star. most exciting roles Hollywood could offer an actress at the time. Bonnie An unknown stage-trained actress with only two films under her belt, is not simply Clyde’s sidekick, but a fearless, gun-toting outlaw in her Dunaway got the part after Penn saw her in The Happening (1967), even own right. Not only that, but she is a sexually forward woman unafraid though Natalie Wood, Jane Fonda and Tuesday Weld had all been consid- to show her desires, a novelty in Hollywood at the time, whereas Clyde ered for the role. It was an inspired decision on Penn’s part, and not only is clearly uncomfortable with intimacy. The suggestion that the fearsome did Dunaway hold her own opposite Warren Beatty as Clyde, but her pas- bank robber Clyde Barrow may be impotent was one of the film’s boldest sionate performance gave the film its emotional core. touches, and it adds poignancy to Bonnie and Clyde’s relationship, which Penn clearly realised the importance of Dunaway’s Bonnie to the film they only seem able to consummate through crime. Both actors bring a and he chose to open the story with her: first a close-up of Dunaway’s lips, subtle tenderness to those scenes and Dunaway’s sensuous beauty turns then her face in a mirror before she gets up to reveal her nude back. She to touching vulnerability when Clyde rejects her advances. SIXTEENTH RAINDANCE FILM FESTIVAL 13 Proud to be supporting the Raindance Film Festival... ... and proud to be working on some of the best independent films. Post production: audio, editing, telecine, voice-over, graphics, Film House media encoding, digital film, DI grading, restoration, DVD and 142 Wardour Street distribution services for film and television. London, W1F 8DD All at 142 T: +44 (0) 20 7878 0000 www.ascent142.co.uk one of Dunaway’s most complex creations, a femme fatale who is fatal only to herself, who lies not to manipulate men but to protect herself and those she loves, and who ultimately cannot escape her past. Dunaway had been nominated for an Academy Award for her role in Chinatown (and previously for Bonnie and Clyde), but she finally won one in 1976 for her portrayal of tough-as-nails TV executive Diana Christensen in Sidney Lumet’s biting media satire Network. The film denounces the increasing drift of television towards exploitative sensationalism, and Dunaway’s bright, ambitious Christensen is seen as part of the new, unscrupulous generation responsible for this shift. Driven and passionate about her job, she doesn’t have much time for romantic relationships. When she does have an affair with the middle-aged former Head of News Max Schumacher, whose job she took, it unsurprisingly doesn’t last. Watching the film now, it is striking how much of the bile is directed at Dunaway’s character, and this even though as a young woman trying to make it in a world ruled by middle-aged men she is clearly not the one in charge. In spite of the obvious villainy of Robert Duvall’s or Ned Beatty’s characters, it is Christensen that is most closely identified with the evils of modern tel- evision, as ex-lover Schumacher makes clear when they separate: he can’t stay, he says, or he will be destroyed, ‘like everything you and the insti- tution of television have destroyed’. While the animosity directed against the only young female character in the film is rather dubious, Dunaway’s intense portrayal of Christensen makes her a fascinating, multi-faceted Previous spread The Thomas Crown Affair (1968); above Flick (2008) character whose all-consuming love for her work leads her to make some Bonnie and Clyde is the story of two characters with a tremendous truly disturbing decisions. hunger for something bigger, who shape each other into mythical figures. Dunaway’s career took a downturn in the 1980s, and this has been Clyde takes Bonnie out of Smallville and makes her a famous outlaw but commonly blamed on the Joan Crawford biopic Mommie Dearest (1981), their exploits only become the stuff of legend when Bonnie writes their based on the memoir written by Crawford’s adopted daughter Christina. story in a poem, ‘The Story of Bonnie and Clyde’. Says Clyde when Bonnie Overly melodramatic and one-sided, it was slated by most critics although reads it out to him: ‘One time I told you I was gonna make you somebody, Dunaway was praised for her uncannily accurate portrayal of the Hollywood that’s what you’ve done for me. You made me somebody they’re gonna star. Beyond the camp following that it has acquired, it remains an interest- remember’. Dunaway had the same hunger, and Bonnie made her some- ing film, if only as a startling example of Dunaway’s capacity for excess, her body too, propelling her to instant stardom. ability to throw herself so completely into a character, which allowed her to Now Hollywood royalty, Dunaway would be offered some of her best give such remarkable performances as Bonnie Parker or Evelyn Mulwray, roles in the decade that followed, as directors were drawn to her pecu- but which, if not properly channelled, can easily turn to caricature. liar combination of aloofness and volatility, sophistication and emotional Dunaway found grace with the critics again in 1987 for her affecting intensity. She followed up Bonnie and Clyde with Norman Jewison’s classy portrayal of the still beautiful but alcohol-ravaged wreck Wanda in the caper The Thomas Crown Affair (1968), oozing glamour and seductiveness Charles Bukowski-scripted Barfly.