Looking up to a bright future at IFI

TWENTY YEARS after it first opened in Temple Bar, the Irish Film Institute is looking to a future filled with bums on seats.

For Shauna Lyons, the IFI’s new public affairs and marketing director, there are festivals to co-ordinate, DVD box-sets to release and online video clips of its film archive to plan. Free wifi for its bar and cafe customers has been installed this week.

But there is also the past to celebrate. This Saturday, the arthouse cinema will travel back in time to 1992 as part of month-long IFI20 celebrations marking the anniversary of its opening in an old Quaker meeting house.

“My ambition is always about audience development – getting bums on seats,” says Lyons, who joined the IFI this summer from the Dublin Theatre Festival.

In September, nostalgic bums will have the option of 20 “landmark” films from the IFI’s history, kicking off on Saturday with the first film ever shown in the Eustace Street building.

Waterland – directed by Stephen Gyllenhaal back when few had heard of his children Maggie and Jake – stars Jeremy Irons and Sinead Cusack, who will both be on hand to introduce it. And as it’s “1992 Day”, Wayne’s World will also grace its screens, while teas and coffees will make a welcome return to 1992 prices (translated into euro, of course).

Other films lined up for IFI20 include 2008’s The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (the cinema’s biggest hit to date with 11,000 attendances) and 2000’s Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (the previous holder of that record).

The institute will also run tours of the Irish Film Archive throughout the month. “We’re throwing open the door to the public to come in and look at the vaults,” says Lyons – vaults that store some 26,000 cans of film.

An open weekend of free cinema on September 15th-16th will serve as a membership drive, explains Lyons. Some 8,000 people pay the €25 annual membership that offers various discounts, with the average member attending films eight times a year. The IFI is set to recruit a membership officer in a bid to build on this base.

Back when then taoiseach Albert Reynolds opened the Irish Film Centre in September 1992, the two-screen cinema had a target of 110,000 annual admissions.

A three-screen since 2009, with around half its titles exclusive to the cinema, it now attracts more than double that number of annual admissions. Attendances are up 24 per cent on last year, according to Lyons.

“We have looked very strategically at our screenings, including screening times, and we’re pretty price-sensitive as well,” she says.

Free wifi is “kind of essential these days”, she believes, while the development of a new website, mobile site and a social media presence on Twitter and Facebook are similarly crucial for generating footfall.

Lyons is also “going through the technicalities”, including copyright issues, of transferring some clips from the IFI’s archive onto its website, giving film fans a taster of the archive’s celluloid riches.

Lyons has a busy winter ahead, with the 2012 French Film Festival and a Hitchcock retrospective in association with the British Film Institute on the IFI’s calendar.

Old Quaker pews may still be found in the building’s bar, but much has changed in 20 years.

“In 1992, Temple Bar was a rundown area,” observes Lyons. Since then, its streets, like the IFI itself, have taken a few turns.

“I know there was the stage of the hen nights and stag parties, but I think that’s passed now,” she says. “It’s really bounced back as a cultural area.”