Handing out copies of Nisimazine to the people standing in line at the Cineplex can turn out to be quite educational. Especially when a group of very nice old ladies are the first in line for an independent Iranian film by a first-time director with a story set in the Iranian-Iraqi border zone. That tells you something about the Alba Festival - apart from the obvious fact that Alba is a beautiful city, especially when bathed in the sunlight of a very near springtime - it tells you that audiences here have an acquired taste for films, and that’s probably the result of the ongoing presence of the festival itself.

Actually, it’s not uncommon for festivals in smaller towns to screen a more mainstream kind of films to their audiences. General (and quite prejudiced) opinion states that smaller communities are not the best place for the new to flourish, or at least not regarding art. But for a first-time visitor, the AIFF has turned out to be a happy surprise: a humble yet passionate festival which has created and maintained a healthy habit for a different kind of cinema.

So I guess I have to contradict Bruno Fornara’s statements from the interview we published: he said he tried to come up with a programme that would appeal to the larger audiences on one side but also to the so-called ‘specialists’. The curious (and great) thing is that here, apparently they’re both the same.

Augustin Mango