Interview – Rachel Hayward

Rachel Hayward, Programme and Senior Manager/Producer at HOME Manchester, discusses her career, childhood influences and upcoming projects. Hayward is responsible for many major areas surrounding the multi-art Viva Festival and the national project CRIME, a Hong Kong Festival. While working at HOME she has also lectured a range of film and cultural topics at Manchester College.

Q. When you were growing up was there as big of a presence of foreign cinema as there is today and do you think over your career you have brought more influence of them over to Manchester?

A. [Excited] Oh, I wanna say yes, course I wanna say yes. In terms of when I was growing up, erm, so I was learning – well, like so many other people – languages and that’s where I very much saw my future. My dad used to record films for me and I pretty much got free reign to watch whatever I wanted as long as it was in a foreign language. So I had a great swearing vocabulary [laughing]. And so that was the thing that really drove me. In terms of whether I’ve been able to influence things I think I wouldn’t be able to say I’ve personally done that. As a team, as an organisation then yeah absolutely, there are certain films that we have brought to the city that wouldn’t have otherwise been seen.

Q. How do you determine what films make it into the Viva Festival and which ones don’t?

A. There are quite a few different requirements. We will focus on having things like a broad geographic spread because we have got a responsibility with the title. We usually show around twenty-five films so in fairness to do justice to Latin America in under twenty films is tough. A broad spread of representation so that will be in terms of geography and language. We’ll have a broad spread of audience appeal so here we are thinking of things for older audiences, things for teenagers, things that will particularly appeal to LBGTQ audiences. Quality is always the most important thing.

Q. Do you think there’s any particular styles or genres that do better than others?

A. We’re very lucky to have that broad spread. With a broad spread of ages comes a broad spread of tastes, experiences and interests. We find that music stuff does really well and that’s across the ages. [lively] I’ve just actually agreed today that we are going to do an Iron Maiden documentary which is going to be brilliant. It’s a really interesting one. We do a folk festival that takes place with us; we do a jazz festival tie in. I’m not into jazz or folk but I appreciate so many people are… I am more likely to go sort-of the Iron Maiden way. There are some things that just wouldn’t work for us… or in the past we might have said wouldn’t work for us that we are now turning around. So now we have erm a mini-festival in partnership with Film 4 which we call ‘Film Fear’ and that’s taking place over Halloween this year as you can imagine [laughing]. And that has kind of also paved the way for having kind-of more horror films throughout the rest of the year.

Q. Have you got any more sneak previews of any projects coming up?

A. Yeah I mean we program sooo far in advance. I am doing a season of work around Indian films. So this actually took place last year but we are hopefully going to make it an annual thing. That’s called ‘Not Just Bollywood’, so that’s Indian independence. In terms of stuff that gonna be new, erm we are going to do a year called ‘Women in Global Cinema’. So that’s throughout 2019. Pretty much every partner we work with will have to have a special event that is female focused, female lead, female directed, or maybe for female audiences – but I’m not so keen on that side of things erm purely because I don’t think audiences are one kind-of homogeneous thing. I have never worked in that way and had a theme for the whole year before so we will see how it goes and in two years time we will be able to evaluate.

As a closing statement, Hayward said that the lesson she’s learned so far has been “Don’t pass good opportunities onto other people, do it yourself.”