Why supporting your local film festival matters | Little White Lies

Festivals

Why sup­port­ing your local film fes­ti­val matters

04 Feb 2016

Words by Jessica Kiang

Crowded theatre audience seated in rows, viewing an event on stage.
Crowded theatre audience seated in rows, viewing an event on stage.
They may not be able to promise glitz and glam­our, but small inde­pen­dent film fes­ti­vals are now more vital than ever.

There is a film fes­ti­val cir­cuit”. This you learn when you sud­den­ly find your­self on it. It’s why the air dur­ing the sec­ond half of Venice is thick with low-lev­el anx­i­ety about seat­ing arrange­ments on flights to Toron­to. It’s why come mid-Jan­u­ary Film Twit­ter gets clogged with com­plaints to US air­lines about miss­ing lug­gage en route to Sun­dance. It’s why casu­al acquain­tances sign off their farewells in Berlin with unkeep­able promis­es to meet in Cannes.

In the great body of the inter­na­tion­al film indus­try, these big fes­ti­vals are the major organs, with reporters cir­cu­lat­ing through them like so many cor­pus­cles. As such, it’s easy to regard them as an end in them­selves and to for­get the big­ger pic­ture they osten­si­bly serve.

One way of recon­nect­ing to that big­ger pic­ture is by going small­er. Those major fes­ti­vals – along with a hand­ful of oth­ers like Locarno, Rot­ter­dam, Karlovy Vary, SXSW and Busan – are the ones that get the head­lines but they account for only a frac­tion of the 3000+ active fes­ti­vals that, accord­ing to a 2013 sur­vey, exist across the globe. Log­i­cal­ly we know that: most of our home­towns, how­ev­er small, have a film fes­ti­val with­in easy reach – ones that don’t tend to get the cov­er­age, the glitzy pre­mieres, or Mar­tin Scors­ese on the jury.

I was recent­ly invit­ed to sit on the jury of one such fes­ti­val (Scors­ese was unavail­able). Black Movie Fes­ti­val in Gene­va is boutique‑y by anyone’s stan­dard: the 2016 edi­tion was a lov­ing­ly curat­ed selec­tion of 66 fea­tures in which Cannes favourites met micro-bud­get­ed indies; Latin Amer­i­can para­noia dra­mas jos­tled against brac­ing debuts from South Africa; old Sion Sono movies were pro­grammed against Ous­mane Sem­bene clas­sics. It’s ter­rif­ic, and I had nev­er heard of it.

Once there, that felt incon­ceiv­able. It’s a small fes­ti­val, but with its army of ded­i­cat­ed staff and pleas­ant vol­un­teers – not to men­tion its facil­i­ties, its par­ties, its hilar­i­ous mar­ket­ing – it is an ecosys­tem unto itself, with in-jokes, com­mu­nal his­to­ry and a col­lec­tive mem­o­ry. In short, it has its own mythol­o­gy. It bog­gles the mind to mul­ti­ply out three-thou­sand-fold the effort and endeav­our the fes­ti­val rep­re­sents, to get a rough idea of how much of this kind of grass­roots art-house film fan­dom exists world­wide, with lit­tle thought for mon­ey or glo­ry, lit­tle press cov­er­age and next to no chance of being seat­ed next to a Cop­po­la at dinner.

So why both­er? Black Movie’s tire­less direc­tor, Kate Rei­dy, looks mild­ly sur­prised when I ask. Even though it’s dif­fi­cult get­ting all the means togeth­er, find­ing the venues and so on,” she says, it’s still a very priv­i­leged job to have.” She and fel­low direc­tor Maria tell me they are great cin­e­ma lovers and it’s one of our biggest wish­es to share with the audi­ence the films we’re lucky enough to see.” It’s a sim­ple state­ment, but it belies a lot of struggle.

An incu­ri­ous vis­i­tor could eas­i­ly see noth­ing of the mov­ing parts below, but it’s a small mir­a­cle that Black Movie is still around. Rei­dy is quick to relate its chal­lenges to wider issues, to the whole change in the eco­nom­ics of cin­e­ma in gen­er­al. Most of the small inde­pen­dent the­atres are clos­ing – here in Gene­va six or sev­en have closed in the past five years alone – so all around us it’s get­ting more dif­fi­cult to have this sort of event exist.” Indeed, just weeks before the fes­ti­val (whose own fund­ing has recent­ly been sup­ple­ment­ed by crowd­sourc­ing), a key part­ner venue faced cuts-relat­ed clo­sure pri­or to a local cam­paign which nar­row­ly res­cued it.

The irony is the very cuts that threat­en insti­tu­tions like art-house and rep cin­e­mas, which are often inte­gral fes­ti­val part­ners, make the fes­ti­vals them­selves that much more nec­es­sary. With­out a near­by inde­pen­dent cin­e­ma pro­gram­ming non-mul­ti­plex films, how else will whole regions be served the lat­est offer­ing from Yor­gos Lan­thi­mos or Apichat­pong Weerasethakul? Our audi­ence looks for­ward to this event every year because it’s about the only place they get to see these films,” says Rei­dy. But that need is not recog­nised by fund­ing bod­ies: when I ask lat­er if she’s afraid expan­sion might change the festival’s friend­ly cul­ture, she laughs. I wish I could have that fear! It’s not a prob­lem that we have, we’re not going to get any big­ger that’s for sure… Our main focus is try­ing to keep it going at the size and lev­el that it is.”

These fes­ti­vals, espe­cial­ly in towns where arts insti­tu­tions are forced to do bat­tle for every pen­ny, are where non-pro­fes­sion­al movie­go­ers – let’s call them the audi­ence” – come to see exact­ly the sort of films that tend not to receive a gen­er­al release. They are not the periph­er­al back­ground radi­a­tion of mod­ern-day film cul­ture, they are where that cul­ture hap­pens, in much broad­er and more pro­found terms than on the rar­efied cir­cuit”.

If it’s a con­stant wor­ry that film appre­ci­a­tion among the wider pub­lic is ail­ing, the rem­e­dy lies in these small organ­i­sa­tions – world cinema’s Médecins Sans Fron­tières, if you will. So sup­port your local film fes­ti­val any way you can: it may be bare­ly get­ting by on a wing and a Kick­starter, but it is cinephil­ia at the coalface.

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