Reel People

By PENELOPE COLVILLE

IN 2007 Peter Sallade decided what happened in Beijing for the next few years was going to make it a very important time and a very important place. The creative visionary who started the Beijing International Movie Festival (BIMF) that very year is jubilant that the annual event has just gained legitimacy. In 2008 and 2009 the government was limiting mass organized events in order to keep the environment for the Olympics and 60th anniversary of the PRC a safe one. The BIMF events continued in those years but under makeshift circumstances in bars and clubs mostly attended by small, hip bands of 20-somethings. Progress consisted of the BIMF moving on to screenings in university lecture halls, the best they could do without working through all the state requirements for access to commercial venues. Sallade with some committed Western and Chinese cineastes still managed to put on good, low-key festivals, but Sallade explains to press conferences in posh hotels in central Beijing: “This is our fourth year and feels like our first, because we just got government backing and graduated to big fully equipped cinemas.”

        Some people use sports to open up cultures to each other, we use films.

Peter Sallade gets lights, camera, traction.

Sallade sums up his higher motive. Anyone can submit a movie to BIMF and everyone has a chance of having their movie screened, not just by the public, but also by people in the movie industry in Beijing. The winning quality of the festival is inclusiveness. “We try to get our filmmakers as many opportunities as we can to get before the commercial film industry and in front of decision-makers here,” he says. In the belief that there’s a chance here for independent films to compete with Hollywood – not a big chance, but a chance nevertheless. Over 200 submissions came from nearly 40 different countries and this year 31 films were screened, from all five continents. It was not limited to features, shorts or animations; the groups in Beijing exclusively promoting documentaries do an impressive job, so that genre was a lower priority for the organizers; despite that, BIMF got so many good submissions and they happily included some.