It's nearly one am on the night of the
second day of the ECU Film Festival, and while Belgian musician, Karim Baqqili,
spins out some wild gypsy jazz on an oud, Patrick Chadwick is talking to me
about Icelandic weather patterns.
We're milling around at the after-party at
Les Voutes Saint Paul after a long day of screenings. The wine is flowing, in
another room somewhere in this strangely cavernous place people are dancing to
MGMT with champagne flutes in their hands.
Patrick tells me that despite the best
assurances of the Icelandic film board that May was the best time of the year
to shoot, the first week of his shoot for his documentary, Memories of Old
Awake, saw almost uniformly poor weather. Finally the sun broke through,
"and we shot almost non-stop for forty-eight hours - I don't think I've
ever worked so hard."
We started talking about the weather - as
might be the wont of two Englishmen abroad - in response to a question asked
back at the Sept Parnassiens nearly three hours earlier. Memories of Old Awake,
a film about Cambridge professor, Emily Leftwidge's field research into the
ancient sagas of Iceland, had just screened and a member of the audience asked
why they chose to make such a serene and beautiful film about such blood-soaked
stories.
Professor Leftwidge admitted it made an
interesting disjunction. But for Patrick, chatting a few hours later, slightly
rueful that he hadn't said so earlier, is was the sheer overpowering force of
the Icelandic landscape that compelled the strange, dreamlike quietude of his
film.
He admits he was nervous at first at seeing
his film on such a small screen, having previously only watched it on his
laptop. But despite just using a handheld DV cam (with a little help from Zeiss
50mm Planar lens), the images achieved a proper cinemascope lushness. Patrick
was justifiably thrilled with the results as seen on the Sept Parnassiens great
silver screen.