ECU Film Festival - Day Three

It's about a quarter past four on the third day of the film festival and, due to a slight delay in scheduling, director Alan Arrivée is fielding questions about his film, The Man at the Door, from the audience members assembled outside the Action Christine cinema. 

Ostensibly about the intrusion of an apparently threatening Mexican immigrant into the tightly locked home of a recently separated American woman, for Arrivée the film is a metaphor for relations between Mexico and the United States. "We need to stop hanging on to the image of America in Normal Rockwell paintings," he says, "-which you may notice don't feature many Mexican immigrants." 

Earlier in the day, Nikola Chapelle took the stage in the Grand Salle (inside the cinema) to discuss sound design as "not just a tool - it is artistic as well." The cinema is now so influenced by Hollywood, he says, "that we are always disappointed by reality." Hence the need to use sound to exaggerate and emphasise, and direct the audience's attention - albeit subconsciously. 

"You can use sound design as music," he says - pointing to scene in the Coen brothers' No Country for Old Men which feature a dazzling mosaic of over twenty-five different kinds of wind sound to build tension and elaborate the story-telling.