Chichester film premiere celebrates Impressionist painter who has been unjustly neglected

Phil will be there in person to introduce the film on Saturday, August 27 at 4pm.

“I love that cinema. One of the reasons that I put so much effort into making films for the cinema is that there are fewer and fewer places in our communities where you can just bump into someone like you used to in banks or libraries or wherever. The perfect cinema is somewhere that's got great films, a nice cafe, maybe a photographic exhibition going on; a place where they know their clientele and where the clientele know each other, and New Park is excellent in every respect. I have rarely had a film shown there that has not sold out, that’s not been really enthusiastically received, where I've not sold lots of DVDs afterwards and where I've not had a really lovely reaction – and as a film maker I really appreciate that. And film festivals are huge amounts of work. You can really underestimate just how much work goes into putting one on and the Chichester Film Festival is an excellent example. Film festivals have their ups and downs and of course we have had Covid but somehow they have just managed to keep on going. I just think that the film festival there and the cinema are things that should be really prized.

“The cinema chains have in mind the younger audiences that are going to keep going back to the returning brands again and again, the Marvels and so on. About 80 per cent of their box office is that kind of thing but if that's not your bag, then there very few places you can go and again New Park is just perfect in that sense.”

This is the tenth year for Phil’s Exhibition on Screen series: “In the next couple of weeks I will be finishing our 33rd feature film, this one on Edward Hopper. About half the films are based on exhibitions, the other half are straight biographies, and the biographies of these artists are just fantastic because they had such extraordinary narratives behind them.

“The most popular art genre is still the Impressionists but I do think that history has done a bit of a disservice to two key members of the Impressionists, Berthe Morisot and Mary Cassatt. Many people won't even have heard of Mary Cassatt but she was right there in the mix, a key part of what was happening. She was an amazing woman who was born in what is now Pittsburg, but she spent almost her entire life in Paris.

“If you look at a painting of hers of perhaps a woman and a child, it might look straightforward but when you look more carefully there is a lot going on there reflecting her own life, the period and what she was trying to say. Nobody really said anything about the fact that she was a woman artist and she hated the term woman artist. The other artists just accepted her as an artist but I think history has done her a disservice by regarding her as a woman artist. The fact is that she was tremendous. She lived a long time. She covered the whole Impressionist period, and she was a fantastic and important painter.”