DAY 13 SUNDAY 4th OCTOBER, VANCOUVER, CANADA

Up at 4.30am to get to the airport for a flight to Vancouver. I love Canada and I love Vancouver so I’m really looking forward to this leg of the trip. I have been to Canada many times and have never had anything but the most fantastic times. And when IN SEARCH OF MOZART showed at the Vancouver Film Festival 2 years ago it was a big success. Showing Beethoven at the Film Festival should be fun. Mind you, the journey wasn’t much fun to start with..on arrival at the airport I was gruffly informed that the flight was
cancelled. I’m sorry but US airports can be rough old places and I guess the staff there has developed a defense mechanism which entails that they don’t look at you, smile or seem to care much. Obstinacy comes in useful at times like this…and though they offered me a flight 4 hours later I refused and demanded an earlier flight on a different airline. This was agreed and I had only a couple of hours wait for a United flight which was actually pretty good. Especially as they made a mistake (which I kind of encouraged) and put me in business! A delight to arrive in Vancouver – such a beautiful spot. Sad not to be arriving with my family though. Arrived about midday at the festival hotel – and it’s a lovely hotel, the Sutton Place. It really does help on these trips to be in a nice hotel and this one fits the bill. I check in with the festival – they have some great films and I hope I get the chance to see a few. There are about 2000 festivals I believe and one has to choose very carefully which ones you enter and why. Some are useful for seeking distributors, some for press, some to reach an audience, some to enter competition and maybe win an award, some just because the location is nice and you’ve been invited. Vancouver is a good one because of location, the range of films you can see (lots of Asian ones because of Vancouver’s relation with Asia), and a very enthusiastic audience – some watching 5 films a day! I wish we filmmakers could take a share of the box office but festivals struggle like everyone else. I guess every year they have to rely on sponsors – and in this day and age there is nothing guaranteed about them. Anyway, I managed to see a film in the afternoon about the pianist Glenn Gould. Nicely made by people who clearly thought he was a great pianist though I’d liked to have heard from musicians telling me why he was – or indeed was not – so ‘great’. Great archive – that’s often the key to films. I do daydream about a film about Mozart or Beethoven using imaginary DV archive – can you imagine if someone had some home video of Mozart playing billiards or Beethoven joking around in a local bar…