Teresa Cavina, one of Europe’s best-known festival programmers and curators, has joined the Mediterrane Film Festival as artistic director.
She worked on the programming team of the Venice Film Festival from 1989 through 1997, then in 1998 moved to the Locarno Festival, which she co-directed from 2001 to 2005. The following year she launched the Rome Film Festival, where she was co-artistic director till 2008. Other programming credits include Venice’s Giornate degli Autori, FIPA Biarritz, Abu Dhabi, El Gouna and Busan. She has also founded many successful coproduction platforms and development funds for films. We asked her about how she is approaching her new job in Malta.
THE FILM VERDICT: The theme of Mediterranean cinema has exerted a siren call on many festivals. What is unique in your approach as artistic director to this important theme?
TERESA CAVINA: The ‘festival’ formula is a mature formula, so it is difficult to find unique paths. Rather, I would say that what makes a festival unique are its contents, the way they are balanced, and the place where the festival takes place. There are beautiful festivals scattered along the shores of the Mediterranean, I won’t mention them for fear of forgetting some. But just as an example of types, there are ‘aggregator’ festivals like Sarajevo, which has unquestionably become the centre of Balkan cinema; there are festivals that give special attention to national cinema, like Les Journées cinématographiques de Carthage; and there are festivals that have Mediterranean countries, like us, as their focus.
Malta’s history is the history of the Mediterranean. Malta’s culture, its very language, have welcomed, included and reworked much of the culture of this sea. Its landscape, its buildings, represent seven thousand years of history, perhaps more, and of welcome migratory movements in the Mediterranean. The festival could only take up this legacy and try to build, over time, an important point of exchange and reinvention of the possibilities of collaboration and growth of the visual universe of the area.
TFV: How complicated is it putting together a program of contemporary films from around the Mediterranean in this frightening political moment, with the war in Gaza still at its height and the question of mass immigration far from resolved?
TC: This is an important, and very difficult, question. I think that the North Star is always the same: to look for strong original voices, for good, inspiring films, and the rest will follow.
It is very important to have faith in filmmakers, in their talent. They live in our time and are witnesses to complex, sometimes tragic realities that filter through their art, helping us to know, to think, to understand by activating our critical capacity without manipulating it. Fortunately, I had no difficulty in finding these kinds of films and I am very proud to show them to our audience. Culture, the real, free culture, is always on the side of peace, of humanity and fights all forms of racism and all forms of war.
TFV: As one of the most experienced festival programmers around, how has your thinking evolved regarding what kind of films are best for what kind of audiences? Any tips for programmers new to the game?
TC: It’s normal for a programmer to constantly try to refine his taste and do his utmost to see and study everything that happens in the audiovisual universe, but he must never forget that he is not a university lecturer or a film critic (at least while he is doing his/her programming work) nor is a festival is his private playground, but the place where a film director meets his audience. A good programmer tries by all means to get in touch with the public, to understand them and to help them, with patience, to broaden their interests, without being too complacent but also not too brutal in his or her uncontaminated cinephilia.
Tips for new programmers? Develop your taste not only within a self-referential film universe, always be curious about everything, be humble and open, love one’s audience immensely, be in the theatres with them to study their reactions, and meet producers and directors in order understand how much work and how many dreams there are, even behind a film that will never be selected.
