And - an essential feature of all decent festivals, this - there is an official café housed in a disused underground car park packed with beer and beanbags. Unlike the highly exclusive London Film Festival, with its red velvet ropes, sponsored champagne receptions and VIP lounges, Raindance has networking drinks every night at 10.00 and everyone's invited. Even if it's probably a pay bar.
A minor caveat: sadly, any resemblance between Grove and the Sundance Kid is not physical. There is no connection between their festivals and the two men have never met, though Grove took an irate call from Redford in the early days. "Why are you using my name?" the star demanded, and then hung up. But Grove was not about to let Redford rain on his parade.
Not that Raindance hasn't been hit hard by the recession. Last year it netted £100,000 in commercial sponsorship. This year the haul so far has been just £3,600, Grove cheerfully reveals. Undaunted, he proceeds to discourse on a host of other money-making schemes. Apart from the festival, Raindance also produces low-budget features and runs film-making courses: Grove thrusts into my hands a book hot off the press, Beginning Film-Making, just published by Methuen, and written by himself, of course.
From a Canadian Amish family, he came late to cinema. It was the devil's playground, his parents warned him, but one day, aged 16, he was sent to town on an errand and the playground beckoned. He recalls crying like a baby at the movie and afterwards went up to touch the magic screen. At least the film which deflowered this movie virgin, Lassie Come Home, is unlikely to condemn him to eternal damnation.
On arriving in England, Grove studied fine art, then joined Henry Moore's army of sculpture technicians. He recalls one day observing Moore out gathering tiny pebbles, which he then proceeded to sketch in detail. Grove marvelled that the master of the massive and the monumental would concern himself with such minutiae. "I'm building up my vocabulary of shapes," the sculptor told him.
There's probably a moral here somewhere about small beginnings and - to mix metaphors - acorns and oaks, but we'll let that pass for the moment. Instead, we'll announce that we shall be reporting regularly from Raindance and reviewing some of its highlights.
Given the below-the-radar origins of most of the movies, it's hard to pick these out at this stage, though Grove himself points to a few: The Panda Candy, a rock ‘n' roll lesbian love story from China; Redland, an "avant-garde Western" with echoes of Terrence Malick's Badlands; and My Suicide, the last film to star David Carradine, who died shortly afterwards in mysterious circumstances. Many will be duds, as is the way with all festivals, but Raindance can claim to have given such indie breakout hits as The Blair Witch Project, Memento and Ghost World their UK premieres, so watch this space.
As we leave the cafe, Grove asks the waitress to let him plant Raindance flyers on the counter. Not allowed, she says, smiling. But outside in the street, he "accidentally" leaves some programmes on the terrace tables anyway. Like Henry Moore, he's leaving no stone unturned.
