And so with the aims and ambitions of the festival gradually taking root and fuelling enthusiasm for innovative programming, 2010 approached. With the addition of an advisory panel of industry experts (which by 2012 includes Daisy Allsop, Fred Hogge, Olivia Hetreed , Simon Relph and Jonathan Coe) putting their support and backing to the festival, things were rolling. As with all festivals, the dream was to create something that would bring people together “… to make film fun and memorable, rather than sitting in front of your DVD player at home” as Steven says. There are many festivals doing this now – Secret Cinema, Nomad Screenings and other festivals over the country – but at the beginning it was Tilda Swinton’s film festival in Scotland, Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams.

In a ballroom in Nairn, Scotland, s he held a miniature film festival, deck chairs, bean bags, fish finger sandwiches and home baking. Tilda Swinton said they were aiming to “reinject some romance into the film festival circuit” which chimed exactly with how Steven and Nic were thinking in another little town at the opposite end of the British Isles; not just the” film for films sake” as Nic says, but the whole experience from food (in From Page to Screen’s case, often provided by incredible local baker Leakers) to music to decoration, creating a magical atmosphere.

For From Page to Screen, all these ideas and influences came together in 2010, the first proper festival and a much bigger affair with… number of events…. It also marked the first year of collaboration between Bridport’s two venues, the Arts Centre and the Electric Palace – for Steven, the sell-out showing of A Single Man at the Palace was his best moment of the festival; the combination of the film, the subject matter, and the speaker, Katherine Bucknell. For Nic, the lassoing of Lynn Barber to close the festival with a screening of the film of her autobiography, An Education, was his greatest coup; hearing her talking on a BBC breakfast show, he emailed in an invitation and moments later had the satisfaction of hearing the invitation read out live on air. “That sounds lovely” said Lynn Barber “let’s talk later”. Some talk later, and Lynn was secured as a guest at what would go on to be a sell out screening of this Oscar winning film.

And from there, we moved on to 2011, the biggest festival so far. The greatest addition here was the concept of a Guest Director, something that many literary and film festivals have embraced (most famously with Port Eliot’s addition of Martin Scorsese to programme a few films at their festival in Cornwall). Steven had heard Jonathan Coe speaking about They Were Sisters on Francine Stock’s Radio 4 show The Film Programme (the synchronicity of this not to be lost on us) and invited him to speak at the 2010 festival. To Jonathan’s disappointment, he’d been unable to attend ‘I was very regretful about that because it sounded like a wonderful idea for a festival and I did want to be involved and I assumed as you do when you turn something down that they’re never going to ask you again….”. So when Steven got in touch and asked him to guest direct the whole thing, he was more than happy to oblige. “He was probably the best person we could have got to be the first curator” says Nic “he didn’t see it as a token post but absolutely threw himself into the whole idea of planning a season and having very ambitious ideas which he said probably wouldn’t come off…. what was fantastic was he DID it!”. His ambitious ideas included Kazuo Ishiguro, Bill Forsyth, Nicholas Mosely and many others. (More about the 2011 Festival in a later entry – and keep your eye on the blog for the filmed interview between Jonathan Coe and Francine Stock as Jonathan passes over the mantle…).

To the sadness of all, Steven stepped down from the festival after 2011 to progress to pastures new. The work that he did in establishing the festival never went unappreciated, and his good humour, enthusiasm and boundless good ideas made the festival a pleasure to work on. A good time to sing his praises and THANK HIM from everyone on the committee, past and present. So with 2011 a bright and burning success, and 2012 looming on us under the brilliant guidance of Francine Stock, what does Nic, as only surviving member of the original team, see as the future of the festival? “It’s all about growing the festival bigger and more significant as a place to consider this art form; adaptation” he says “There’s no reason why it can’t become a very important opportunity and an endless exploration of it, thanks to the endless supply of adaptations. Adaptation has always been here and always will be”. With the Flash Film competition making a name for itself among young film makers (250 words of winning fiction from the Bridport Prize turned into 60 seconds of film) and more emphasis on craft and the secrets of film-making this year, the festival will continue to embrace new ideas.

And who would be their dream curators for Francine to pass the baton on to? For Nic, it’s festival hero and friend, Kazuo Ishiguro. For Steven? Because of her heartfelt belief that non-mainstream filmmaking is important, Tilda Swinton herself. Here’s hoping.

Programme Details the 2012 Festival to be announced soon!

And next on the blog, an exclusive interview with Joe Dunthorne!

So we’ve set the scene with Bridport and what is going on in this diverse and beautiful market town. So how did the From Page to Screen festival itself come about?

In a series of incidents lost in the mists of time, and over numerous lattes at The Bull, From Page to Screen was born.  Brought together by Lindsay Brooks, at that time the new director of the Bridport Arts Centre, Steven Horner and Nic Jeune sat down together to discuss their ideas for bringing a film festival to Bridport. “I felt strongly that there was an audience and a need for film in Bridport” says Steven “we needed to find a way to give it an edge that was different to every other festival… how could we make it specific to Bridport?” The obvious answer was to embrace Bridport’s already established reputation as a centre for literature, with the Literary Festival and the Bridport Prize.With this in mind, the first event was a screening of John Fowles’ The Collector and The Last Chapter as part of the Bridport Literary Festival 2007.

A screening of the films and a Q&A with adapting screenwriter David Tringham were sellout events, and it became apparent that the marriage of books and film in Bridport could be something that would work. In 2009, came a pilot season of one film a day for five days, including Che, Far from the Madding Crowd, and The Girl with a Pearl Earring with producer Andy Paterson and screenwriter Olivia Hetreed (now known as screenwriter on Andrea Arnold’s Wuthering Heights and making a repeat visit to talk about this film at the festival this year).

The festival was gaining momentum; “Our biggest decision at the time was, it had to be an excellent film, it had to be an excellent adaptation, and it didn’t have to be a lot like the book, contrary to a lot of people’s views”.  For Nic and Steven as “film people” the main point of the adaptation was not how good the book was, but did the film tell the story of the book visually and still get across the essence of ideas, did it transcend the literature?  “It isn’t about mimicking the book into celluloid; it’s about could adaptation be an art form in it’s own right” says Nic. This is a question that still fuels the heart of the festival and comes up time and time again in festival discussion; there’s more to adaptation than just putting the book on screen.

Francine Stock (guest curator 2012) said recently;  “Adaptation is not all about words!  It’s mise en scene, also – surely that’s very much the point…  a 3 second shot of Diagon Alley can convey what JK Rowling takes 2 or 3 pages to describe”. With film able to do visually or through sound design in 30 seconds what it might take a book two chapters to say, the two forms are coiled together, with a huge range of interpretation and re-imagining that screenwriters and directors can, if they choose, bring to an adaptation. Exploring this is at the heart of From Page to Screen.

Things did not all run smoothly in the 2009 pilot season (a near disaster with distribution and speaker problems at Che “we were selling tickets for an event that possibly had no film and no speaker…” says Nic jovially, though I doubt he was so jovial at the time) but by the last night, spirits were high “we finished by thinking well, that wasn’t bad!” says Nic “well” puts in Steven, feet on the floor “we finished thinking it went better than we thought….”.

But for Nic the realisation of this pilot season really turning into something came as Olivia Hetreed pulled out her copy of Girl with a Pearl Earring; suddenly the adaptation process slotted into place; “here was that physical copy of the book that this screenwriter had absorbed, broken down… you could see people going ok… book, person, film, the whole process”.

This is the genesis of the entire From Page to Screen idea; the festival bug had bitten, and with the final night a huge success they were keen to begin to emulate this in future years.

Read Part Two tomorrow to find out what happened next!

….the UK’s only festival of adaptations? I’m not surprised. Last year we had over twenty events, speakers including Booker prize winners and Bafta Winners. Welcome to the blog where we will be keeping you updated with programme news as it breaks as well as giving you a sense of what is so magical about Bridport and this festival.

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First, let’s introduce you to Bridport. There’s no question but that it is all happening in this small, mad West Dorset market town. With film festivals, book festivals, food festivals and hat festivals (and that’s no exaggeration) – there’s something for everyone in the mix. Keep an eye on the blog for more about all these things in the future!

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But for now…. How does the From Page to Screen festival fit in? It’s a question of bringing two key strands together, Film and Books …

With our two beautiful venues: Bridport Arts Centre …

and The Electric Palace an art-deco gem with a funky interior (keep an eye on the blog for a future entry about this incredible building, and primarily, it’s original monster of a projector) Bridport is a natural home to a film festival. We’ve also got the award winning Bridport Film Society which has been showing films here for nearly 50 years, pop-up village cinemas and most recently, the partnership of Curzon Cinemas with the Bridport Arts Centre.

Not only does Bridport love to watch films, it also loves to be used as locations,
Anwar Brett, author of Dorset in Film will be writing
an exclusive article for the blog in the future….

Books and Bridport go together like toast and honey. With four booksellers in the town, the incredible Saturday market stalls poetry reading a regular feature in Bridport pubs, as well as the many authors living in the area, it’s hard to get far in the town without stumbling over something or someone literary.

The Bridport Prize run by the BAC is the largest open creative writing competition in the English Language; it was judged this year by poet laureate Carol Ann Duffy. No surprise then that we also have two literary festivals, the Bridport Literary Festival  and the Open Book Festival . Bringing film and books together for an event as part of the Bridport Literary Festival in 2009 (a screening of John Fowles’ The Collector) was the first step towards the establishing of From Page to Screen… see the blog for a future interview with the founders of the festival, Steven Horner and Nic Jeune and more about how the festival has evolved over the past four years, to it’s peak last year with BAFTA and Booker Prize winners, Bill Forsyth and Kazuo Ishiguro.

And now, with the Flash Film competition bringing together the prize and the festival – 250 words turned into 60 seconds of film – the festival grows and grows by the year. It’s all about bringing people together to discuss books, film, and film making. As Francine Stock, this year’s guest director of this year’s festival, said in her interview with Jonathan Coe (soon to appear on the blog), “a sort of 3D Book Club”. Could anywhere be better suited to this than Bridport? Keep up with the blog for more on Bridport, the festival and news as it breaks. We’re setting our programme now for what may well be the biggest and best FPTS so far!

From the company that brought us Secret Cinema and Future Cinema  (keep your eye on the blog for more about this at a later date – including an exclusive interview with the set designer on Secret Cinema!) comes Future Shorts, a pop-up film festival of short films from all over the world, screening at locations all around the country.

Bridport Film Society are pleased to sponsor one of these very evenings at the Hayloft on Tues Jan 17th at 7.45. The programme comprises both locally-made short films from PVA MediaLab and the prize winning selection from Future Shorts; free admission though donations for film hire and projection will be gratefully recieved.

A drink and an evening of film in the cosy environment of The Stable. What could be nicer?