DELIGHT Première – Moscow IFF 21 June 2013
What a fantastic way to launch the film! Moscow is an amazing, monolithic city, skirted by Stalin’s famous skyscrapers, the Seven Sisters, in one of which we stayed, courtesy of the MIFF team who gave us such a warm welcome.
Having hustled our way through passport control and survived the taxi-ride through evening rushhour it was straight to the hotel for an interview with the first national news station. Excerpts of Gareth Jones’ interview played on national tv throughout the Festival’s opening day, great publicity for our opening.
A whirlwind 2 days included a lightning tour of the city, 2-hour press-conference and TV interviews, red-carpet Opening Ceremony and Gala Screening, and a very late after-party our survival of which was assisted by jet-lag. We’d probably have gone on dancing all night fuelled by the vodka mojitos if the chilly river breeze hadn’t started to take its toll.
The following evening our interpreter and guide Maria led us onstage to present the film before an audience of many hundreds, and we were honoured by the warm response before and after. It’s hard to know how many layers are present in your film until it’s launched before a public audience. One or two of the Russian journalists at the press conference were keen to interpret DELIGHT as a political film, in the light of our references to Chechnya. Others saw it as a purely psychological drama, the unfolding of one woman’s trauma through a subjective lens, a paradigm of the war-traumatised individual. Others focused on the lovestory and beautiful surroundings of Wales… still others homed in on the music and different voices which accompany Echo’s journey. We were fascinated by how many different ways people found of reading the narrative, and look forward to bringing DELIGHT to more festival audiences in the coming months.
Thanks to our leading man Gavin Fowler for coming with us to Moscow to launch the film, to Rachel Johns for her support, to Maria Nikolayeva for her friendship and guidance during our stay, to Natasha Reysner and all the Festival team for their impeccable organisation, to the President of MIFF Nikita Mikhalkov, and to Prof. Kirill Razlogov for inviting us. It was breathtaking.
See you soon! Fiona Howe.
