How to run a film festival

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Coming Soon to a Festival Near You: Programming Film Festivals

Edited by Jeffrey Ruoff

A quotation from Cameron Bailey asserts the importance of film festivals, which have ‘become the single most important arbiter of taste in cinema’.  This is good justification for an interesting addition to the literature on film festivals that focuses on festival programming.  Jeffrey Ruoff’s introduction gives us a brief history of the growth of film festivals, and a summary of their different aims:  ‘[to] celebrate film as an art, affirm different kinds of identity in film, facilitate the marketing of films, or often, indeed, some combination of these’.  He ‘does not attempt to be comprehensive or encyclopaedic’ nor does he deal with ‘the powerhouse festivals (Cannes, Sundance, Toronto, Venice, Berlin)’. While this book is aimed at students of film studies, there is much here to inform and entertain the film buff.

Gerald Peary’s ‘Memories of a Film Festival Addict’ explains how he first became involved with film festivals and gives some insights to the ‘behind the scenes’ interactions that can result from festival attendance, such as the experience of visiting Ingmar Bergman’s home in Faro during the Bergman film week in 2010.  A fascinating chapter by James Schamus, ‘CEO of Focus Features’ ‘break[s] down the cost of bringing a “gala” première to an A-list festival such as Cannes’.  For anyone unfamiliar with film financing, the sums involved are eye-watering.

In ‘Just What is it That Makes Today’s Animation Festivals So Different’, Marcin Giżycki notes that the increasing number of such festivals is due, in part, to the lack of opportunities for independent filmmakers to get selected by the ‘big mainstream’ festivals. Sayoko Kinoshita, who has since 1985 been the director of the Hiroshima International Animation Festival, one of the ‘big mainstreams’, discusses the struggles involved in trying to set up such a festival, the reasons for locating it at Hiroshima, and its underlying ethos. This is ‘to pursue world peace through international cultural exchange and to enhance mutual understanding through the art of animation’. His account is a good illustration of how particular historical, political, social and cultural factors in its host country can affect the form and programming of a film festival. 

Similar issues are explored in other countries.  Toby Lee looks at the effect of the economic crisis and other factors on the Thessaloniki 2009 film festival, while Gönül Dömez-Colin deals with the development of Turkish film festivals against a background of government censorship and the need to foster film culture in a country ‘where cinematheque culture does not exist’.  Sangjoon Lee considers the issues involved in developing the Asia-Pacific film festival to celebrate Asian cinema in the period following the Second World War, and how cold war rivalry between the US and the USSR affected local film culture.  Skadi Loist discusses the specific cultural issues in programming for LGBT (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transsexual) festivals, and how these have led to changes over time.

The remaining four chapters are all written by or focus on those directly involved in film festival programming.  Richard Peña describes how he became a film programmer and eventually ‘the director of the New York Film festival since 1988’ and the struggles to keep the festival to ‘a relatively small selection of films’ and non-competitive, setting out the advantages of such seeming limitations.  Jeffrey Ruoff’s interview with Bill and Stella Pence shows how the Telluride Film Festival, which began as a small, local festival for ‘a captive audience of disaffected hippies’, became almost the victim of its own success as it became ‘more commercial, more high-end’.  The festival’s success meant a switch from ‘rare treasures and undiscovered masterpieces’ to more of a focus on new films. 

The interview touches on the difficulties involved in booking the desired film, the negotiations that have to take place with the producers and distributors, and with other film festivals.  Mahen Bonetti deals with the author’s role in establishing the New York African Film Festival, the issues in bringing a relatively unknown film culture to a New York audience, and how the founders reached out to an African-American audience.   Zoë Elton provides an entertaining account of one day at the Mill Valley Film Festival, vividly conveying the hard work involved while neatly incorporating insights into the issues that arise in developing a programme for such a festival.

Coming Soon to a Festival Near You:  Programming Film Festivals, edited and with an introduction by Jeffrey Ruoff,  is published by St Andrews Film Studies 2012. 260pp.,  30 mono illus, £19.99. ISBN  978-1-908437-02-0