It’s been 20 years since ÉCU launched its first festival in 2006 with the goal of discovering and honoring the best independent films from around the world. Since its launch, ÉCU has continued to support and build a community of people who celebrate independent cinema by launching partner festivals in Asia, the Americas and Africa.

To commemorate those whose films had been featured at the festival since its start, we wanted to reconnect with some of ÉCU’s past Official Selection directors and ask them a few questions about their films, their experience participating in the festival, and catch up on what they are currently working on now.

In this edition of the alumni series, we talked with some of the festival’s 2008 Official Selection Directors, including: Phil Grabsky for his film Escape from Luanda, which he co-directed with film producer David Notman-Watt, Endre Hules for his film Torn from the Flag, which he co-direct with Hungarian filmmaker Klaudia Kovacs, and Greg Loftin for his film Saxon, which won ÉCU’s Best European Dramatic Feature that year.  

One of the first directors we talked with was Phil Grabsky.

Based in the UK, Grabsky described filmed Escape from Luanda at a time when he was making documentary films, for specific strands, for channels like the BBC, Channel 4, and ITV. Produced for Channel 4, Escape from Luanda follows the story of three music students who attended one of Angola’s only music schools. “It’s quite an honest film,” Grabsky said. “You know, if you have reality shows these days … you always want to give a sense that one of them is going to make it as a superstar … The reality in Angola and Luanda was that there was no hope. These were desperately poor [people]. There was an awful lot of corruption that affected ordinary people and despite their best efforts these three students were not going to realize their dreams and we made that as a feature length film.”

In the interview, Grabsky mentioned feeling disappointed when a commissioning editor at Channel 4 at the time made a comment to him, once the film was released, saying “Well that’s Africa done for the year.” “I was horrified then and I remain horrified now,” Gabsky said. “One film was something that he considered to be all Africa deserved. That was the sign of the times then and its probably got worse.”

A few years after Escape from Luanda, Grabsky went on to submit another one of his films to ÉCU, The Boy Mir – Ten Years in Afghanistan, which was selected to be in the festival’s 2012 Official Selection. Documenting the story of 8 years old Afghan boy, Mir, growing up in the war stricken state of Afghanistan, the film is one documentary in a 20 year project Grabsky made, which also includes two other films: “The Boy who plays on the Buddhas of Bamiyan” and “My Childhood, My Country – 20 Years In Afghanistan,” which went on to win several awards including a BAFTA.

My Childhood, My Country – 20 Years In Afghanistan “was a longitudinal film” Grabsky said. “Twenty years we followed this boy growing up, from the end of Taliban to the return of the Taliban. It tells you all you need to know about Afghanistan, the things that were done right, the things that were done wrong.”

Along with his films, for the last 40 years, Grabsky has been running a production company called Seventh Art Productions based in Brighton, England.  “We’ve made television programs for everybody,” he said. “The last 15 years, we have specialized in something that I created called Exhibition on Screen, which is a unique cinema brand that currently screens in about 60 countries. We release four cinema films a year about major exhibitions or major artists or major artistic institutions.”

Some past Exhibition on Screen films Seventh Art Production have made include: Vermeer: The Greatest Exhibition, Mary Cassatt: Painting the Modern Woman, Leonardo: The Works, Klimt & The Kiss and Frida Kahlo, just to name a few. “My focus is entirely on Exhibition on Screen,” Grabsky said. “We make really strong films. … We’ve created this cinema network around the world in which we have an inherent audience that look forward to the next film. … It’s wonderfully creative. I feel like the films do some good. It shows you what humans are capable of, whether it’s Mary Cassatt or Leonardo.”

To learn more about what Seventh Art Productions is working on and watch the Exhibition on Screen films, go to: https://seventh-art.com/

In another interview, we got the opportunity to talk with director, writer and actor Endre Hules for his film Torn from the Flag, which he co-directed with Hungarian film director Klaudia Kovacs.

Nominated for the European Documentary Feature category, Torn from the Flag documents the event of the 1956 Hungarian Uprising against the Soviet Union. At the time the documentary was being made, in 2006, it had been 50 years since the Hungarian Uprising had occurred. According to Hules, there were over 100 films being made of the event at the time.

Hules, unlike others, wanted to make a film that documented the event “in the context of the cold war,” he said, more specifically how the whole world reacted in response to the event. “We wanted to [make] a real documentary,” Hules said. “In other words, no narration. We don’t give you our opinion. We give you the interviews, we give you the footage and then you make up your own mind.”

The film started with the Yalta Conference and ended with the departure of the Russian troops from eastern europe, Hules explained. In the film, “during the uprising, we went day by day of what happened in Hungary, what happened in Moscow, what happened in the UN, what happened in the United States,” Hules described.

They intentionally interviewing people from both sides of the conflict: including: Russian soldiers, the Hungarian revolutionaries, the Secret Service, and people working at the UN, just to name a few. Along with that, in the film several people were interviewed including: Otto von Habsburg and Henry Kissinger.

Hules and his team traveled to several different locations for the film including: the United States, Hungry, Moscow, and Italy. “We had over 300 hours of interviews,” Hules said. “We were very lucky because our producers were two great cinematographers in Hollywood, Vilmos Zsigmond and László Kovács … They were shooting footage during the uprising in Hungary. … We had the most amazing footage, the best documented revolution of the period, thanks to their help. They also arranged for us to get this footage for free which would have cost us an enormous amount otherwise.” 

Shortly after Torn from the Flag, Hules was a writer for the film Prima Primavera which came out in 2009 and then released his own film in 2011 called The Maiden Danced to Death. Following those two films, Hules sold another half a dozen screenplays. In between writing and directing, according to IMDb, Hules, since 1989, has also been acting in a number of different films and tv series, most notably having roles in films like Marvel’s Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., Apollo 13, FBI: International, and For All Mankind, just to name a few.

For the third interview, we got the chance to talk with director and screenwriter Greg Loftin for his film Saxon.

“Saxon is a black comedy,” Loftin said. “It’s a kind of Western, set on a housing estate, and it sort of rifts a little bit on that great feature film Unforgiven, [with] Clint Eastwood. It was one of those projects … where once the idea had taken shape in my head and once I started to draft countless versions of the script, it kind of built up its own traction, to the point where towards the final iteration of the script I had this feeling [that] I just [had] to make this film, or [I’d] die. … It was so important to me, by whatever means, and actually rather crazily, the means were that we got a second mortgage on our house so that we could make this film.”

Submitted to a number of different festivals, Saxon went on to win several awards including a Michael Powell award. The Guardian described the film as “entirely independent and gleefully multi-genre.” Winner of the Best European Dramatic Feature that year, Loftin was one in seventeen directors awarded for their film that year at ÉCU.

“[ÉCU] itself … was an electric space,” Lofin said. “The festival [was] a generator of great creativity and excitement. You’re bumping into lots of filmmakers and enthusiasts and making great connections. We were obviously completely over the moon when we discovered [we’d] been selected as best drama.”

Following Saxon’s win, Loftin was selected to be a judge at ÉCU’s 2009 festival. For the next couple of years Loftin would go on to continue writing scripts and talk with several producers to eventually get some of his scripts made. Since then, in addition to writing scripts, Loftin, for the last couple of years, has been working as a course leader in editing and post production at Ravensboure University in Greenwich, London.

Furthermore, Loftin also completed a PhD program in Film, Cinema and Video studies from the University of Exeter, where Loftin focused on studying what “script writers [can] learn from film editing about storytelling,” which eventually led to Loftin writing his book, Writing for the Cut: Shaping Your Script for Cinema, which was published in 2019.

In addition to finishing his PhD and releasing his book, Loftin also recently embarked on a new project combining his love for screenwriting and editing with AI. “I got quite interested in developing software around screenwriting,” Loftin said. “[Specifically developing] a screenwriting app that [looks] and [behaves] quite a lot like an editing interphase where you use and work in a very media rich environment creating text, images, sound, found footage, AI generated imagery and real timelines so that you could right from the get-go use this app as as a rapid prototyping for screenwriting stories.” With no set name yet, the app is in development. According to Loftin, the working title for the software app is Story Jig.

To go watch the full interviews with Phil Grabsky, Endre Hules, Greg Loftin and more ÉCU Alumni,  go to the ÉCU Alumni: Where are they now? Playlist found at ÉCU Film Festival youtube channel: https://www.youtube.com/@ecufilmfestival/featured