Saskia Wilson-Brown

In January, I attended the Slamdance / Sundance extravaganza in Park City, Utah, helping produce the Slamdance, WorkBook Project & Open Video Alliance Filmmaker Summit.  While there, I participated in and listened to a lot of conversations about the shifting role of film festivals, particularly as those shifts apply to a mid to high level independent festival such as Slamdance. What follows here is the first of five four thoughts that came to me about the functionality of film festivals (and in no particular discursive order).

1. For small festivals, the ‘shifting’ purpose of film festivals is actually not shifting at all.

People seem to concur that the primary purpose of film festivals is (was?) akin to that of an art gallery: To sell art.

Festivals have been acting as the gatekeepers to commercial distribution, and the standard path for a filmmaker would be simple: Make a film; get into a fest; get the film acquired for distribution (of course, if all went well).

Though this is a relevant deduction for festivals like Sundance, which were indeed functional gateways for the film system, I would argue that for the smaller festivals catering to independent or local film (and for the indie filmmakers whose work was typically programmed there) this was never a relevant model in the first place. The reason for that is simple: Distributors tended not to attend those festivals.

This commercial raison d’etre, then, has only ever been an apt assigned purpose for the bigger festivals. Further to that, this fact was sort of inherently understood by the film community: Not many filmmakers ever submitted their film, for instance, to the Tulsa Overground Film Festival, Nevada City Film Festival or Cucalorus with the intention of selling to HBO.

I think we’re assigning and bemoaning this dwindling commercial purpose to small festivals retro-actively in light of a perceived dearth of distribution deals – a dearth which, again, is only really relevant to festivals that were the hosting space for sales in the first place, and entirely irrelevant to the continued purpose of the small festivals who saw no such activity in their meeting rooms. Most annoyingly perhaps, small festivals gamely play along, trotting out their one or two success stories as bait for a system that never functioned for them or their filmmakers in the first place.

With the advent of digital media and the burgeoning (but hopeful) success stories around online/DIY distribution strategies, the purpose of the festival as a sales agent becomes even more obviously questionable. But more on that later when I publish my second thought: ‘Culture-defining, not money-making’. Probably fairly obviously from the rather literal title, it is about what I see as the ‘new’ purpose of film festivals.

For now, I leave you with a recent tweet from Ted Hope: David Brown’s Secret To His Success: “I never lived beyond my means, & therefore, I never had to be a slave to Hollywood.”

Next installments:

• #2: Money-making should not a successful small festival make. Culture-defining should.
• #3: What festivals should do to better serve their communities: An exercise in managing filmmaker expectations.
• #4: How to sustain without selling out: An exercise in ego management.

Filed under: diy distribution, film, theory , culture, film festival, independent film