Interview with FLicKeR director Nik Sheehan in the Globe and Mail
September 11th, 2009 | by Alive Mind | Published in Filmmaker Interviews
At the end of the Toronto International Film Festival, a handful of filmmakers will win awards. The presenters will say flattering things; the award winners will say silly things. But this year, I will not mock.
I will cringe in sympathy.
I admit I was never someone who as a child stood in front of the mirror holding a shampoo bottle or hair brush, imagining what I would say when I made my Oscar speech. In fact, I was one of those little boys who stood in front of the television mocking people making acceptance speeches, while my older sisters told me to get out of the way.
My conversion came in the city of Wroclaw, Poland, last month. I was attending the Era New Horizons film festival, where I had been invited to introduce some Canadian films. The city was gorgeous, the film programs were adventurous, the lineups not too long.
In short, it was filmgoer’s bliss.
Near the end of festival, I was asked if I wanted to attend the closing-night ceremonies, and I said no thanks. But on the day before closing night, I was sent a message asking if I could please reconsider. A Canadian film had won a €10,000 (almost $16,000) prize for best art film, and I was the only Canadian left in town to accept it.
The film was Nik Sheehan’s documentary, FLicKeR , based on a book by Globe and Mail editorial-board editor John Geiger, called Chapel of Extreme Experience: A Short History of Stroboscopic Light and the Dream Machine . It was about a device, invented by artist Brion Gyson, which is supposed to induce a kind of drugless high.
One of the festival staff gave me a copy of Sheehan’s acceptance speech, and as I started to read it over, I became increasingly nervous. There were a couple of Polish names; the one that had me particularly worried was “Ewa Szblowska,” which in Polish is pronounced more like “Eva Za-bwolf-ska.”
I asked my student volunteer, Jagoda, to rehearse it with me as we walked to the theatre, but I kept screwing it up, getting “blows” for “bwolfs.”
At the event, I took my seat in the midst of a group of people who were clearly important to the Polish film industry, and whom I did not know.
The Polish minister of culture, who had come in from Warsaw, made a speech about the importance of Polish film around the word. There was another speech from the mayor of Wroclaw, which seemed to have a lot of jokes.
Then the prizes started getting handed out. I listened carefully to the mixture of Polish and English until I realized it was my turn to make my way up to the stage. The emcee for the evening liked saying funny things about each person coming up. (“She’s coming up slowly now, taking her time. Oh, now she’s picking up speed.”)
I had no idea what he was saying about me; just before going onstage, I had put my earpiece and translation device in my pocket, afraid I was going to drop it.
As I walked up to the podium, someone approached me and handed me a large sunflower, which I tucked under my arm. I looked out into the blinding light, where the audience was, then down at the page.
I read the speech one sentence at a time, the way I had read material all during the festival, so that the translators could keep up.
Turns out that for awards night, though, they had brought in a really good translator who could remember and translate entire paragraphs at once.
I became aware that I was sounding like someone who was either short of breath or who barely knew how to read English, never mind Polish. I also realized the translator was particularly fast in my case: He wasn’t even listening to me; he was reading the acceptance letter over my shoulder.
Then I reached that name and I remembered there was a “wolf” in it: “The amazing Eva Zab-wolf-ska,” I said. I heard a titter run through the audience.
Previous award winners had commented on how heavy the award was, and I started to get worried. Would it look rude if I threw the acceptance letter down on the ground so that I could hold the sunflower and the big glass award at the same time? As it happened, I managed to jam the speech into my jacket pocket just before the award arrived. It was about the weight of a bucket of water.
I stepped back from the podium, and the head of the jury that had picked FLicKeR came over and said something to me that I couldn’t comprehend.
“ Nie mowie po polsku ,” I said, which means “I don’t speak Polish.”
She said it again, and I realized she was speaking English. But still I couldn’t understand her.
“Thanks,” I said.
I was moved farther downstage. My translator grabbed my hand and pumped it in congratulations.
“The most important thing,” he said, “is that you now have Polish distribution for your film.”
“It’s not really my film,” I said.
“No,” he said, “but you have Polish distribution.”
I made my way back to my seat, but just before I sat down, a tall, blond woman from the festival staff came toward me and took the big glass award out of my hands.
I sat in my seat twiddling my sunflower for the rest of the awards.
Just as I was getting up to leave, I felt a tap on my shoulder. “It’s time for all the award winners to go onstage for a photograph,” said the tall blond woman.
“But I didn’t win any award,” I said.
She looked at me sadly. “Please,” she said. “It would be nice.”
I returned to the stage and shuffled along in a line of award winners, holding my sunflower and glass award once again. Right ahead of me was Michael Brooke, another juror and curator of the British Film Institute’s archives, who, as the last British person in Wroclaw, was accepting an award on behalf of filmmaker Steve McQueen for another prize-winning film, Hunger . Brooke moved to the back of the stage and suddenly dropped. His leg had slipped into a gap in the floor, and though there was a brief flurry of excitement from the crowd, neither the leg nor the award was broken. I had a brief unkind thought: “Better him than me.”
Then we all stood in a row, holding our awards and sunflowers high, smiling for the cameras, real award winners and frauds alike.
After the photo was taken, I saw the amazing Ewa Szblowska. “I’m really sorry I screwed up your name,” I said.
“No,” she replied. “You said it correctly.”
“But I heard the audience laugh.”
“They were laughing because they were surprised,” she said. “They expected you to get it wrong.”
Liam Lacey
From Saturday’s Globe and Mail
Last updated on Wednesday, Sep. 09, 2009 03:16AM EDT
