A Keanu Reeves film fes­ti­val promis­es a most excel­lent adventure

With the third John Wick due in cin­e­mas soon, a new event on the film cal­en­dar shines a spot­light on the mul­ti­fac­eted career of its star, Keanu Reeves. Tak­ing place at Glasgow’s CCA, Keanu­Con is Europe’s first Keanu Reeves film fes­ti­val. It comes via Match­box Cineclub, an inde­pen­dent exhibitor that’s already had suc­cess with the actor-focused fes­ti­val for­mat across two instal­ments of Cage-a-rama, along­side cult film fes­ti­val Weird Week­end last year.

“John Wick was the turn­ing point for me,” says KeanuCon’s Megan Mitchell of the star’s appeal. ​“I just real­ly con­nect­ed with Keanu going on a mur­der­ous ram­page to avenge a dog.” Match­box pro­gram­mer Sean Welsh express­es a sim­i­lar appre­ci­a­tion of Reeves: ​“You can sense he’s whole­heart­ed in what he does and that’s result­ed in many, many great films. He also has an inher­ent soli­tude which I think, para­dox­i­cal­ly, draws you in. Very few actors can boast the same mix of rich, long fil­mog­ra­phy, pop cul­ture pres­ence and a cer­tain self-aware­ness that’s part of their rap­port with the audience.”

Across the week­end, there will be screen­ings of beloved and over­looked Reeves films, from My Own Pri­vate Ida­ho and Speed to his debut direc­to­r­i­al effort, Man of Tai Chi, and act­ing debut in the 1985 Cana­di­an short One Step Away. The fes­ti­val will also host the UK pre­mière of Des­ti­na­tion Wed­ding, in which Reeves stars along­side Winona Ryder, as well as a Bill & Ted dou­ble bill with spe­cial guests and a post-screen­ing concert.

On want­i­ng to make Keanu­Con hap­pen, Mitchell says, ​“We were pro­gram­ming [Nico­las] Cage’s work, who is def­i­nite­ly a polar­is­ing fig­ure in pop­u­lar cul­ture, and kept com­ing back to Keanu as a kind of anti­dote to hav­ing to defend Cage all the time. Keanu inspires so much love, par­tic­u­lar­ly from women, which, for me, is impor­tant. The inter­est and pas­sion that fans of Keanu have seems not just ​‘thirst’ ori­en­tat­ed, although there’s no deny­ing Keanu’s hot, but from an abil­i­ty to relate to his hon­est emo­tion­al vulnerability.”

Hav­ing car­ried out some audi­ence polling, Match­box Cineclub had a sol­id base to work from in terms of a line-up, though it wasn’t a case of sim­ply stick­ing only to those pop­u­lar titles. ​“Sim­i­lar­ly to Cage-a-rama,” says Mitchell, ​“we thought about how to theme the week­end and came up with a ​‘from babe to Baba Yaga’ pro­gres­sion to help shape what we’d screen.”

“The inter­est­ing thing will be find­ing the babe in the Baba Yaga, and vice ver­sa,” adds Welsh. ​“You need to be care­ful not to com­part­men­talise your audi­ence. We’ve encour­aged an invest­ment for the whole event by mix­ing the gen­res across the whole pro­gramme, but still care­ful­ly sched­ul­ing the films. I real­ly resist the con­cepts of guilty plea­sure and ​‘so-bad-it’s‑good’ cin­e­ma. It’s less of an issue with Keanu than Cage, but snark is a sink­hole. There’s an idea with Keanu that he’s wood­en and basi­cal­ly an air­head, which we think is demon­stra­bly untrue. Hav­ing said that, if any­one wants to take a shot every time he says ​‘whoa’, we’re not going to stop them.”

Keanu­Con runs 27 – 28 April at Glasgow’s Cen­tre for Con­tem­po­rary Arts. For more info vis­it cca​-glas​gow​.com