Dialogue: Ilda Santiago and Jay Weissberg

We’ve been talking about how exhausting festivals are, but there must also be a certain thrill to it, because you love it and cannot not go to festivals.

Ilda: I think that film festivals are like bubbles, you like the temperature or the colour or something else about a certain festival that makes you go to one or the other. It’s the energy that surrounds a festival. And then of course you have the programming, as in Rio you have a special programming of Brazilian and Latin-American films and you specialize in that. I think every festival does create a special thing. The festival goers and press get totally addicted to the adrenalin, it’s a drug. Every time after the festival I say I am never going to do this again and then my husband asks, if there is anything like the NA for directors of festivals.

Jay: I think it is the same for festival goers as well. I just came back from one festival, I’ve just got one week at home, do I really want to go to the next one? And you don’t to a certain degree, but then you get there and actually are glad, or you have this constant thought: if I don’t go to that one, I could miss the film that I have been looking for or hoping for. So, yes, it is a drug, because you can’t stop thinking, what if you can’t have it?

Ilda: What really gives me the impression of an addiction is that I have been seeing films for months, non-stop, the whole day. I am not addicted to the festival, I’m addicted to film. At the end of the [Rio] festival I want to go straight to the cinema and see a movie. I think that’s why I know, that I am addicted.

Jay: You can’t turn it off.

Ilda: Sometimes I think, what if people stop sending me DVDs? Even the bad ones. I am happy to see the bad films. That’s addiction.

Jay: That’s addiction.

If you could change your positions in the industry and be a producer for the next few years, which film would you like to produce?

Ilda: It depends on your personal idea of cinema. If I had the money, I would think twice where to put it. The producers are of course not just throwing money in the air. They want a return. From their point of view they do what they know will return. I don’t know where I would put the money, but I definitely would be more open about the story. I would avoid the regular stories..

Jay: I would probably look for young directors who are working apart from what has become canonical. In Malaysian cinema you have for exemple this bunch of young Malaysian young directors, who keep repeating the same kind of films. The Philippines are a great example: Do we have to see one more film about the slums? We’ve seen it with Lino Brocka, who did it so well. I am not saying the interest in that milieu has dried out, but it means, that anything else about any other stories from the Philippines isn’t used. I would love to fund somebody from the Philippines who wants to make something different, or Malaysia or Brazil.

Ilda: Another good example is Un Prophète by Jacques Audiard which is an amazing film. As I walked out of the cinema, I thought to myself, would I have taken this script. I probably wouldn’t have as a producer. You could think this is a long film, a tough film that nobody wants to see. But it is an amazing film. It has got passion, action and it is sexy at the same time. Can you imagine a film that only takes place in a prison, but there is something sexy to it? Concerning that film we have to thank the producer, because thinking of myself I probably wouldn’t have done it.

Zsuzsanna Kiraly