Here is a sprawling, heartfelt, quite beautiful speech that was given by Tilda Swinton in front of a full house at the Kabuki Theatre on 4.29.06, during the just-wrapped San Francisco International Film Festival. My favorite passage: “Filmmaking has always been an act of faith. Not only in the sense in which one needs a certain amount of conviction to get the films made in the first place…

“But also in the more amorphous sense in which one takes one’s faith to the cinema as to the confessional: the last resort of the determined inarticulate, the unmediated, the intravenous experience of something existential, transmuted through the dark, through the flickering of the constant image through the projector onto the screen. The sharing of private fantasy, the very issue of the unconscious made in light. Faith way beyond politics, way beyond religion, way beyond time.” But read the whole thing. Swinton is an exciting writer. As HE’s Nicaraguan correspondent Juan Carlos Ampie observes, “The [letter to a child] conceit feels a tad too precious at first, but as it progresses, it gets…awesome. Towards the end I got chills…and teary-eyed. Yes, I’m a damaged human being.”