Matt Lloyd: Short Film Impresario

The festival looks to have expanded from last year, with even more films in competition – are you finding it easier to get good quality shorts as the festival's reputation grows?

I think the competition programme really is the core of the festival. We were just amazed last year at how many of the film-makers wanted to come at their own expense, from America and across Europe. This year we’ve even more. We’ve got about thirty/thirty-five directors and producers coming from the likes of New Zealand, Singapore, Canada, and you think to yourself, “God, do they realise we’re just a small, new little festival?” I hope they’re coming because the festival’s starting to get known internationally, but I think, mainly, they come because of Glasgow the city and its exciting reputation.

For me it’s so crucial that they’re there. I said this at the launch: Scotland film culture is at its best when it’s in collaboration with international partners. If we can bring more of the world to the festival and put them in the same room as our own film-makers at a very early stage in their careers, we are contributing to that film culture internationalism that Scottish film thrives on.

There’s also a retrospective on No Wave films [an underground film movement from late 70s New York]. What drew you to this very specific period of American cinema?

It’s quite hard to see a lot of those films. I came to it, initially, through Jim Jarmusch, who’s probably the most successful person to come out of the movement, and, actually, he’s kind of vanilla compared to a lot of the No Wave film-makers. Then Blank City, the documentary that showed at Edinburgh last year and is showing at the GFF this year, sort of reminded me how much I wanted to see these films because it’s full of all these amazing clips – it was really tantalising.

The other reason I wanted to programme them is that they are an example of people making films with no resources. Right now, when so much funding has been withdrawn from our own industry, I hope that can inspire us. Last year, when we had the Court 13 retrospective and Ray Tintori was here, he found it amazing that we all sat around waiting for funding to make films. Court 13’s ethos was, “Just go out and make a film; make the most out of whatever resources you have”. It’s an American entrepreneurial approach which is really refreshing in some ways, and it’s most evident in the No Wave films when they had absolutely nothing.

How do you think they’ll go down with a Glasgow audience?

I hope it will be a popular choice, because what’s interesting about those films is that they were a reaction against the avant-garde American films at the time, which were very structuralist, intensely academic. These films aren’t academic at all; they’re demanding in many ways but on a visceral and emotional level they’re very pulpy.

Also, I’ve noticed that most Glasgow students dress like they’re from New York in 1978 [laughs], so it’s perfect.

You’re dedicating the GSFF to Jafar Panahi and are showing The Accordion, the short film he made before being imprisoned for six years by the Iranian government. Do you see it as the GSFF’s responsibility, and film festivals in general, to highlight this injustice?

If we hadn’t already been showing his film then it would have seemed a bit opportunistic, in that we’re just a tiny little short film festival. We’re not Berlin or Cannes who can make these grand statements. But we were showing the film already, which is amazing, a perfect example of a short film made very simply and cheaply, but one that also says so much.

It was almost instinctive, though. I didn’t really think about it when we sent out the announcement that we were going to dedicate the festival to him. There are all sorts of oppressions and abuses around the world that we should all be up in arms about and many of them make this look like a small thing, but for a film festival, or anyone who promotes film, without being too pretentious about it, it’s an attack on all of us, in a way. To not respond to that would be a dereliction of duty. Basically, the way I see it, we’re just contributing a world wide movement which is purely there to raise consciousness about this and to embarrass the Iranian government.