Jersey: a channel island famous for its cows, potatoes and wealthy residents. It’s not the first place you’d think to go for a film festival. But from 22 – 25 September the Branchage International Film Festival returns, for the fourth time, to the tiny island off the coast of Normandy.
The festival launched in 2008, with the aim of entertaining local audiences as well as drawing visitors from the UK and Europe. This is not the place to come to see the premiere of the latest George Clooney movie, or A-list movie stars gracing a red carpet, but, as if in acknowledgement of its lack of headline-grabbing glamour, Branchage has sought to make its name by offering unusual and often unpredictable cinematic experiences.
In past years, the festival has screened The Battleship Potemkin on a tugboat and Sleep Furiously (a 2009 documentary about a small farming community in Wales) in a barn. The locations offer a welcome change of scene from a popcorn-strewn Odeon. This year, the unconventional offerings include screenings at the island’s Opera House, at parish halls, in occupation-era war tunnels and at a castle separated from the mainland by a causeway, which the audience can only get to (or escape from) at low tide.
Without the power (yet) to attract big-ticket premieres, the festival mostly screens recent art-house hits (this year the programme includes Joanna Hogg’s Archipelago, and the wonderful French film Of Gods and Men, for example). But it also commissions new work, particularly soundtracks, and the new creations are often as intriguing as their venues. To name a few: a new animation film by Sam Steer will be screened accompanied by his harpist sister performing a newly commissioned score; the artist Fritz Stolberg will show a multi-screen installation consisting of footage from the Jersey archive and old home movies discovered in islanders’ lofts; the cellist Gerard Le Feuvre will play a new accompaniment to the 1929 footage shot by Captain Irving Johnson as he sailed around Cape Horn on a square rigger vessel; and the festival will close with a live performance of a soundtrack to The Great White Silence – the footage from Captain Scott’s last Antarctic expedition in 1924.
Such unusual, live performances show the imagination of this small, relatively unknown festival. It might lack the showiness of Cannes, or the romance of Venice, but those annual jamborees, with their predictable bank of glossy stars and paparazzi, lack something too: a spirit of adventure and originality that allows an audience to watch a film in an entirely new way. And then walk home at low tide.
To find out more about the festival, visit branchagefestival.com
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