Tributes as Chichester International Film Festival director bows out

Film producer Andrew says he will “attempt to summarise” Roger at the festival’s opening gala on August 10, with his words followed by the UK premiere of Il Boemo, a 2022 feature film about the life and career of the Czech composer Josef Mysliveček.

Andrew, whose works on screen include Rush, The Ipcress File, The Crown and Munich: The Edge of War, has lived near Chichester since 2008/9 but he had a little weekend place down here before: “And I think the first time I came to the festival was 2000. I go to a lot of film festivals around the world and they're all slightly different but what I love about Chichester, apart from the fact that it's local to me, is that considering its size it is very, very rich in its breadth and the audiences are great. I have brought down people to come to it and they have loved it. And there is always a sense that the audience that come to the screenings are well informed and ask really good questions.”

As Andrew says, film festivals are obviously the work of a team but at the same time they have to be a benign dictatorship in terms of the taste of the festival director and in that sense Roger has been one of the best: “I do think a lot of festivals come down to the personality of the director. Toronto was one of the first film festivals that I went to and the guy that ran it was a quite laid-back guy and you really felt that you were going to his festival but I think Toronto has expanded so much that you just don't feel that anymore and I couldn't even tell you now who the director at T oronto is because it's lost that aspect now. But in Chichester you can really sense Roger at the festival. What Roger has done is absolutely brilliant. I often see him at Berlin or Cannes and he walks miles. He gets to see the films personally and selects them personally and I think that really makes a difference compared to other film festivals that are basically ticking boxes. It makes such a difference and the fact is that he's done that for 31 years. I'm really curious to know what it's going to be like without him next year. I don't know what the succession planning is but I do know that he will be a very hard person to replace. I'm going to be there at the opening gala and I'm going to do a little speech about Roger just trying to sum up a sense of all that he's achieved and that's going to be quite tough to do.”

Andrew is really looking forward to the rest of the festival too: “I'm looking forward to the Lindsay Anderson season. I worked with him quite a lot and he became a kind of mentor to me.”

The last thing Andrew worked on was a big Netflix action thriller called Havoc about a rogue cop trying to rescue the mayor’s son. It was filmed in Cardiff and Swansea standing in for a combination of Chicago and Detroit, starring Tom Hardy and Forest Whitaker and should be out next year.