Iris on the Move: Berwyn Rowlands on LGBT Progress, Shooting on Super 8 and the Iris Prize Film Festival
Written by Daisy Leigh-Phippard
We meet Berwyn, festival curator, film lover and curry-enthusiast in a meeting room overlooking the campus. The first thing he tells us about is his habit of going off on tangents, warning that we should stop him if he goes on for too long. Nina and I disagree, it’s tangents that are the most interesting thing when it comes to interviewing people. So, in honour of off-topic conversations, the first thing I ask Berwyn is about shooting on super 8 film when he was a kid. ‘It was just a fantastic thing because you had no idea you were learning so much[…]. You don’t know it at the time but it’s a discipline’.
Despite being jealous of the generation that now have the chance to make films on their phones, he admits that digital just isn’t the same quality. ‘I have no reason to believe, with technology being what it’s like, that you could recreate it’. Celluloid film isn’t quite so simple to use as what the modern generation are used to. The film had to be hand cut, the amount you could shoot at a time was limited. ‘Getting a cassette of film was quite expensive. And then you would have to send it off, and then you’re waiting for it to come back’ from processing.
But, of course, our tangent lead back to Berwyn and his love of exhibiting film. ‘In Conway Bay there was an old shop, all wooden sort of inside, with shelves and ladders inside to go up. And you’d have a basket and inside this basket were these 40ft reels of film. And there would be one or two of three, or one of four, and there’d be 200ft ones. So, I’d swap them and then get people into the front room, into the parlour, and there was just this ginormous speaker behind the screen. And (my mother’s got it still) there’s this little book that I’d write down the name of the film, how much I’d paid for hiring it [chuckling], how much I was charging, how many people turned up’.
So really you were making your own festivals, Nina and I point out. ‘I feel like I’m in psychology, I’m being analysed here,’ Berwyn laughs. ‘I loved the fact that when the head pops out of the boat in Jaws, I turned the volume up. And I can remember this girl screaming and running out of the parlour, absolutely screaming. And she came back and started punching me, she was… oh, I enjoyed it. Absolutely enjoyed every second, knowing it would happen’. So shooting on film led to exhibiting it? ‘I tell you what, totally personally, but I think [super 8 film] confirmed that my interest in film was to do with the fact that I wanted total control. And wanted control of the audience: wanted to make them cry and laugh and that was me making them do that’.
Berwyn established the Iris festival, which celebrates LGBT+ stories in film, in Cardiff in 2007 with the world’s biggest short film prize; £30,000 to make the winner’s next project.‘We did a lot of things and Iris was the one; she was the special person. It was a project where it never made money, it never paid for itself. But it felt so proper, I think. It just felt like it was the right thing to be doing’. The festival’s success was in no short part due to the emergence of social media which allowed Berwyn and his team to connect with the expansive gay, lesbian, bi, trans etc. community.
‘We’re known because of the shorts. Iris Prize, that’s the main award’. 25 films are nominated from 20 countries, with 10 spaces left for open submission. ‘We get about 400, so 400 becomes 10. It’s a big deal getting through’. The nomination system has turned out pretty effective, ‘but obviously where it doesn’t work is when you identify the 70 odd countries (too many countries) where expressing your love to the same sex is punishable by death. Those stories from those places are not being told. You might have people from those countries who might have, you know, relocated or found their way to America or Europe. And they will try their best to curate some of the stories, but I’m not quite sure how successful they are really’.
The festival also has a Best British category which showcases 15 short film from British filmmakers, as well as a feature film programme. ‘We’ve got an award for Best Performance in a Male Role and Best Performance in a Female Role. We’re very proud of these, because it’s trans-inclusive. See? Male Role, not Best Male Actor, which is what loads of LGBT festivals still call them. […]When we started it was Best Male Actor and Best Female Actress, so we changed the names. Nobody noticed, but those who did need to know could see what we’d done. Just little things like that’.
‘If you had to deconstruct [our] priorities, I would say that Iris is film first, LGBT+ second (close second). But for some film festivals I think the LGBT comes first, and the quality of the film second’. Nina asks if the emerging generation of progressive attitudes has affected the festival. ‘I think there’s an inevitability that’s affecting the festival. The festival is just a vessel, isn’t it? You fill it with stuff. The stuff reflects the country — the world — we’re living in. It’s a positive one’. What offers a bigger impact for LGBT filmmakers is the technology, which is getting more and more accessible both to make and watch films. ‘You don’t need to build a cinema, you don’t need to have 35mm print, you don’t need somebody with a lorry to drive the prints. You don’t need a projectionist to slide them all together’.
‘But the danger, because there always has to be, is that we’ve got a two-tiered system. We’ve got the privileged — and I’m not talking about money — we’ve got the privileged who have access to content, who can see themselves [represented], who can disagree [with the representations they’re seeing]’. For a long time, LGBT identifying people had pretty much no representation at all, and only recent things like Sex Education, as Berwyn points out, have started creating substantial progress — and it still has a long way to go. ‘The more things that happen, more things like Iris on the Move allowing people to challenge or to question, we might cope. But the reality is there are people who are just not represented’.
‘That moment, whether you’re thirteen, fourteen, or whatever age you are, and you realise, as a girl, that you’re more interested in girls than you are boys, […] I’ve always said it’s like the terror of learning to swim. Once you’ve done it and you’re paddling and you haven’t drowned you’re like ‘oh, this is easy’ — well, easier’. He chuckles to himself. ‘That’s a good one, we’ll use that one,’ he says about the analogy. ‘And I’m not sure, will that ever change? I think that metaphor might not be applicable in the future because at the moment it’s only an issue because it is an issue. It’s still difficult holding hands, I don’t care what people say. You are still making a gesture, it’s still a statement’
‘I think that the business of coming out is still… you’re basically saying, ‘I’m not in the majority.’ And at that age you say you want to be different, but my experience is definitely not wanting to be different. When I realised I was different it was ‘well, fuck it, let’s go for it then.’ But at the same time, I wanted the same jumper my best friend had. You wanted to be like everyone else, you don’t want specs,’ he confides. Both myself and Berwyn, wearing glasses right then, nod at that. ‘But I’m wearing specs, you know’.
We ask why Berwyn thinks film festivals are so important, both as a place of community and a way of experiencing films. ‘With Netflix, you’re not going to meet Lara,’ he replies, referring to the Iris Prize’s last winner Lara Zeidan, writer/director of Three Centimetres. ‘If it’s something like Iris, there’s the fifty short film, and about thirty-five to forty of the filmmakers will be in Cardiff at the same time. And that’s outside of the juries. […] You will meet people with whom you might just connect, especially if you go to the kind of festivals that are sharing the kinds of stories you’re interested in. You will find another lunatic like you who wants to do that. That’s brilliant, because you feel normal’.
‘It’s amazing how empowering it is to realise that developing a script of trying to secure the rights to music, or one of a hundred million things, the barriers to completing your work — that’s shared whether you come from Brazil or whether you come from France, you know’. But, of course, one of the best parts of these kinds of festivals is that they offer audiences a chance to watch films they probably won’t see at the box office, whether it’s an LGBT theme or a filmmaker from the opposite side of the planet.
‘It’s the most fantastic place to meet bonkers people who want to make film. Because they are loony, they are completely bonkers. There are easier ways of making a living. They are almost in the category of politicians because some of them are deluded, they think that they are the best people to put a story on the big screen, there is something of egos, but fucking hell, they’re passionate’.
