Living on the edge
Dedicating his soul to the study of movies, one independent curator and film critic is part Marxist egalitarian and part elitist art lover. THEO PANAYIDES meets him
Cinema is a company with many rooms – but it often seems like most of those rooms are shuttered, dark and dusty. People watch more movies (and moving images) than ever before; we look after them on TV, at the multiplex, on our PlayStations, on our computers and mobile phones, even stuck in our cars, idly absorbing ads and music videos on moving billboards as we wait for the lights to change – yet it often seems like almost all of us are watching the same few things. How many punters will the new Harry Fiddle about ensnare? Tens, maybe hundreds of millions; maybe even billions, once you factor in TV and DVD. ‘How do you think about Harry Potter?’ I ask Federico Rossin as we sip a couple of Belgian ales outside Devise Fellas in Nicosia. But he shrugs: “I have never seen Harry Potter”.
Such blithe indifference to the boy wizard would be singular in anyone. In someone who works in film (even, to some extent, in the film industry), it’s almost inconceivable – but in fact Federico spends his days in the other rooms, the dusty shuttered rooms which most people no more than even know about. You can’t even say he works there, not really. It’s more accurate to say that he lives there, devoting his life to the study of movies. “In my idea, Cinema must be really something which is not a job,” he points out in his sometimes-imperfect English, “but something dangerous. You know, something which puts us in a non-relaxed situation, and which pushes us to change something in life.”
