Executive Director Gregor Ash addresses AFF audience – All photos courtesy Chris Gerwosky

By Emma Brown

For thousands of people in the entertainment industry, the Atlantic Film Festival (AFF) is a huge ten day celebration drawing the year’s best films from across Canada and the around world.

For Gregor Ash, the executive director and the face of the AFF, it’s the best job in Atlantic Canada.

Ash, who joined the festival as a volunteer more than 20 years ago, was drawn to the job by a life long love of movies.  He grew up in Newfoundland and became a devoted movie lover at a young age. The festival takes place each year in Halifax.

“We didn’t have a movie theatre in town,” remembers Ash. “So every Sunday afternoon one of the local bars would break out an old 16mm and play whatever old classics they could get their hands on.”

He recalls afternoons spent watching old Errol Flynn swashbucklers, a variety of Abbott and Costello comedies, and classic Hollywood suspense films such as Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds.  But it wasn’t until Ash was a teen and saw the movie Zulu Dawn, about the 1879 Battle of Isandlwana between the British imperial army and the native Zulu warriors, that he realized movies could do more than entertain, they could stir a person’s sense of moral outrage.  “My grandfather was an old Empire Loyalist,” says Ash. “And he used to sing Rule Britannia to me when I was a kid.  But watching Zulu Dawn I lost my love affair with the British Empire.”

Lia Rinaldo became the festival director in 2001.  Like Ash, it was Rinaldo’s love of movies that led her to the AFF, where she has spent the last 20 years happily combining work with pleasure. With the help of seven other people, she selects the films the festival will showcase.  Rinaldo estimates the group watches over 1,500 movies every year before they narrow their final list down to between 175-250 films. The process is an arduous one that keeps the group extremely busy. “We research year round, travel to other events and then spend from May to August watching as many as we can together as a group,” says Rinaldo.

Although the AFF is an international festival, it has a strong commitment to local talent and every year it seeks to provide a platform for the finest films from Atlantic Canada. “There is so much talent here on the East Coast. We’re pretty lucky. We focus about a third of our program annually on the region and the community is very supportive of their home grown talent –  there are always full houses,” says Rinaldo.

Carsten Knox is the special issues editor for The Coast, a Halifax newspaper. He covers the AFF for the paper each year.  What impresses Knox most about the festival is the excitement it generates for local talent. “You’ve got to get tickets early for anything that was shot in the region – full length or shorts – as those screenings sell out first,” he says.

Laura Dawe is an independent filmmaker from Halifax whose film Light is the Day, debuted at the AFF last year.  The film was made in 20 days with a crew of 11 people for just over $15,000. “Everyone worked long, sweating, swearing, smiling hours for free. So, we kept the overhead low,” Dawe says. Most of the money used to make the film came from friends and other people in their community, while local bands donated money raised from shows and music for the film’s soundtrack.  Talking about the festival’s role in supporting her film debut last year, Dawe was incredibly enthusiastic.

“AFF premiered Light and I can never thank them enough. They viewed it at a really early stage, but they saw potential and trusted us to deliver.  There is nowhere else in the world I would have wanted to unveil the movie.  Everyone with the festival was just beyond helpful,” she says. “Also, the opening night party was at Citadel Hill and I’ve always wanted to get way too wasted on free vodka in there so – check.”

Ash remembers the night well. “We screened the opening film in three cinemas, and then about 2,000 people attended the party afterwards.  We had a big tent, but we couldn’t afford to put a floor down.So the tent is on this parade square, in the middle of this historic fort – but people just partied.  The next day they posted pictures of their shoes on Facebook, covered in mud, and some with broken heels.”

The support that Dawe received from the festival had a huge impact in terms of generating publicity and getting the word out about her film. “Getting into the AFF got me onto the cover of The Coast, which, in Halifax is like getting on to the cover of Vanity Fair, or so I’ve always thought,” says Dawe.  The festival is always happy to help artists whenever possible. Still, they don’t have the resources to fly in as many filmmakers as they’d like, particularly given the rising costs of films. “One of the things we can control is how we treat people and the kind of experience they have with us,” Ash says.

Unfortunately, times have not been easy.  Compared to the Toronto and Vancouver film festivals, Ash says the AFF attracts a significantly smaller audience which means less money generated by tickets sales.

In her capacity as festival director, Rinaldo says, “money is a constant cause of stress in the cultural non-profit world and budgets are at the mercy of so many varying factors from year to year.”  A shaky economy is one of those factors.

“The last few years have been difficult for art organizations, because the recession has really affected corporate sponsorship,” says Ash.  But despite hard times, the festival remains dedicated to promoting artistic talent at home and around the world.

“It can be a tough industry but it has at its core a soul which is giving creative voice to the visions that pop into people’s heads,” says Ash. For a life-long lover of movies, what could be better than being a part of that?