MIFF is first and foremost about a love of film. Providing some context for those films has been a big part of the MIFF experience from the beginning. Each year, special guest interviews are arranged to correspond to the evening screenings. In 2023 MIFF moved away from in-person guests to Zoom interviews to be able to interview filmmakers from around the world about their movies.
In 2025 Lucy Lawless joined MIFF via Zoom to talk about her award-winning documentary Never Look Away.
Jorundur Rafn Arnarson, Visual Effects Supervisor joined MIFF via zoom in 2023 to discuss his work on Triangle of Sadness.
Hugh Welchman, Co-director of the Peasants and Loving Vincent joined MIFF via zoom in 2024.
Past On-stage Interviews:
Previous Artistic Director Joanne McKenzie interviews Henk Van der Kolk, film producer and co-founder of TIFF.
After the Czech film “The Teacher”, past Artistic Director Christopher Thomas interviews Paul Wilson a writer, editor, radio producer and translator who spent a decade living in the Czech Republic.
Before Zoom, MIFF was one of the first film festivals to employ Skype technology so that audiences could hear filmmakers talk about their films. In our first year alone, we talked live with Ralph Nader (“An Unreasonable Man”). Award winning journalist/director David Sington also joined us from the UK to discuss his astonishing documentary on the Apollo missions, “In the Shadow of the Moon”.
