Why are we doing this whole 8½ thing? Because...
When we have lived for 8½ years, we start to encounter a miracle: we begin to get to know what life is like in our own shoes and notice that we are the only ones who walk in them. We begin to notice the world, the universe and everything in it.
We believe that one of the most precious miracles afforded to us by cinema is the invitation to walk in other shoes than our own. The shoes of the people within the frame, of course, in all their dizzying diversity, but also those of filmmakers, whose cameras open windows to other worlds, or unlock doors within our own. These people, whose shoes cinema enables us to walk in, can be our companions for life. If we meet them early, we can always rely on them.
We believe in creating a new birthday to celebrate this miracle.
We love the cinema in all its shapes and sizes. We love going to multiplexes and watching huge-budget, studio films advertised on the side of every bus and in every paper. We love putting on 3D specs and laughing and gasping as one with a whole host of strangers, spilling food we’d never eat anywhere else and being transported via surround sound around the stars and moon and back again.
But we also know that one of the greatest mysteries of cinema is how elastic it is. How many different shapes and sizes it can stretch and shrink itself into. And we have noticed over the many hundred cinema journeys we have taken that our most memorable and exhilarating cinema memories are not of the bigger films blasted from the rooftops of every seventeen-screen pleasure palace, but littler films, often from other countries than our own, maybe made many decades ago, maybe made without colour, maybe with subtitles, or not a single spoken word.
We know that many of these films are rarely trumpeted. You won’t find them playing at the local cineplex; most of them are hardly available on DVD and rarely screened on TV. We want them to be available for a new generation of film adventurers – a precious treasure brought back from distant lands and times. Our secret stash of magic booty.
We were also inspired by Lewis Hyde’s 1983 book The Gift: Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World in which Hyde argues for a “gift economy”: a moneyless domain where we give just because it feels good, and right.
Our aspirations go beyond just recommending or gifting films. For example, the global humanitarian charity International Medical Corps asked us to select some films to show to refugee kids in displaced person camps in Ethiopia and Sudan. We did so and the screenings went brilliantly. We were also asked to select films for a wee touring cinema in Haiti, and again were delighted to do so. In the years to come, we hope to do more things like this – in other words, to become a kind of think tank about kids and great cinema...
Tilda Swinton & Mark Cousins
x
