Sundance to Sarajevo. Kenneth Turan
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Bondi Beach area of Sydney, Australia, through the Autrans Festival of Mountain and Adventure Films ending in mid-December in the high, thin air of southeast France, there is barely a day on the calendar where some film festival is not being celebrated in some exotic city somewhere in the world.
Haugesund, Norway, Oulu, Finland, and Umeå, Sweden, have festivals, as does Trencianske Teplice in the Slovak Republic, India's Thiruvananathapuram, Iran's Kish Island (“the Pearl of the Persian Gulf”), the Australian beach resort of Noosa, and the Italian city of Udine, which unexpectedly bills itself as “the world's largest showcase of popular East Asian cinema.” There are nearly sixty Jewish film festivals in existence but only one QT event, in which director Quentin Tarantino annually takes over the Alamo Drafthouse Cinema in Austin, Texas, and shows favorite films to benefit the Austin Film Society. There is even an intentionally stateless movable feast called Transfest, which facilitates “the simple idea of introducing film festivals which take place somewhere in the world, in another place.”
Festivals have become such a growth industry that Missoula, Montana, has two and a petite but trendy town like Telluride, Colorado, now has three (MountainFilm Festival and IndieFest 2K in addition to the regular Telluride event). And, especially in Europe, various coordinating bodies have grown up to try and create order out of the impending chaos.
On the largest scale, the European Coordination of Film Festivals, created to remedy “the disparity of practises and some dangerous excesses and trends” of the continent's proliferating fests, listed 76 festivals when it began in 1995, a number that had more than doubled to 154 in twenty countries by 2000. On a different note, the existence of overlapping science-fiction-oriented events led to the birth of a European Fantasy Film Festivals Federation to, in its own words, “put an end to a grubby war and sign an armistice.” This group joins festivals in Porto, Brussels, Luxembourg, Rome, Espoo, Stiges, Amsterdam, Lund, and San Sebastián to, among other things, annually present the Méliès d'Or (named after the great French imaginative director), a.k.a. The Grand Prize of European Fantasy Film.
Even with all these official bodies, no one seems to be exactly sure how many festivals there are in the world, not even books created specifically to keep track of them. The Variety Guide to Film Festivals by Steven Gaydos lists more than four hundred, while three other books (International Film Festival Guide by Shael Stolberg, The Film Festival Guide by Adam Langer, and The Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide by Chris Gore) record over five hundred each.
Because, except for big names like Cannes and Sundance, there is less overlap in these listings than one might expect, it's possible that an outlandish-sounding New York Times estimate of more than a thousand fests around the world might not be as wild as it seems. That's enough for the festival circuit to have its own print publication (“I° the international film festival magazine”) as well as a DVD periodical called Film-Fest, which happily describes itself as “your exclusive all-access pass to the latest movies, the coolest parties, the hottest filmmakers and the brightest stars that travel the globe to celebrate the art of film.”
Not surprisingly, film festivals are especially a growth area in the United States — so much so that critic David Thomson, in an arch list in Movieline magazine entitled “i00 Questions We Honestly Want to Ask Hollywood” (“What is Tom Cruise going to do instead of aging?” “Why do they make the new James Bond films seem as if they were made in 1962?”), found space to wonder “Can anyone name five cities in America that do not now have film festivals?”
This proliferation is visible across the board. While New York, ever the cultural behemoth, hosts an estimated thirty festivals (the wildest being the New York Underground Film Festival, annually home to questionable items like Home Brewer Serial Killer and Farley Mowat Ate My Brother), North Carolina boasts thirteen, including something called the Hi Mom Film Festival in Chapel Hill.
It's one thing for just about every city within cheering distance of Los Angeles (Palm Beach, Malibu, Idyllwild, Temecula, San Luis Obispo, Santa Barbara, Santa Monica, Santa Clarita, the Silver Lake neighborhood proper, and the surfside trio of Newport Beach, Laguna Beach, and Hermosa Beach) to have a festival; it's another to witness a similar proliferation in the Midwest. Say hello to the Great Plains Film Festival in Lincoln, Nebraska, the Heartland Film Festival in Indianapolis, even the Hardacre Film Festival in wee Tipton, Iowa, set in the historic circa 1917 Deco-style Hardacre Theater and created, its promotional material would have you believe, to answer that age-old question, “Yes, but will it play in…Iowa?”
One result of this phenomenal growth is that films no one has heard of can take home heaps of honors. The yet-to-be-distributed and all-but-unseen Wedding Cow (formerly known as Good Cows Are Hard to Find) boasted in a press release of winning a full ten awards, including the Daedalos from IndieKINO, the International Independent Online Film Festival of Seoul, South Korea, and the Golden Unicorn from the Europaïsches Filmfestival Alpinale in Bludenz, Austria. Garry Trudeau astutely gave a nod to this fest-mania in his “Doonesbury” comic strip by having B.D.'s actress wife Boopsie, the star of “Chugalug,” “Beerblasters,” and “Pompom Pam,” be the subject of “The Barbara Ann Boopstein Film Festival,” sponsored by the Aspen Ski Patrol and highlighted by, she is pleased to report, “a panel discussion of my film work! Led by Roger Ebert!”
Even a Boopstein festival doesn't seem out of place when you consider some of the stranger names on the festival circuit, events so outlandish they sound apocryphal even if they're not. What is one to make of items with names like the Takoma Tortured Artists Film Festival in Washington State; Eat My Shorts! Comedy Short Film Showcase in Montreal, Canada; Eat My Schlock! Home Grown Trash Film Festival in Brisbane, Australia; and Short Attention Span Film and Video Festival in San Francisco — not to mention another San Francisco event, the Brainwash Movie Festival, whose top prize is said to be the “Charles Manson Loose Eyeball” award?
The first movie event I was exposed to growing up in Brooklyn was the always serious New York Film Festival, which began in i963 and included in its first five years classics like Roman Polanski's Knife in the Water, Milos Forman's Loves of a Blonde, Gillo Pontecorvo's The Battle of Algiers, Bernardo Bertolucci's Before the Revolution, and an explosion of films from Jean-Luc Godard: Band à Part, Une Femme Est une Femme, Alphaville, and Masculine-Feminine.
Not that I had the means to actually see all these films; it's the feeling of festivity and potential I remember from my younger days, the excitement of the full-page ad announcing the event's selections, written up in stirring prose, that appeared every year, one time only, in exactly the same format in the Sunday Arts and Leisure section of the New York Times. I felt, as I have not always felt since, the sense of a door opening into a world of culture and sophistication I had no idea existed, as well as the hope that there might be a place in there for me.
That feeling was only part of what I experienced in 1971 during my first trip to a major world cinema event, representing the Washington Post at the Cannes Film Festival in the exotic (to me, at least) south of France. Mostly I was exhausted, deluged by more movies more often than I wanted to handle.
As naive as I was young, I confided these thoughts to the storied Italian director Luchino Visconti, one of the masters of cinema, who was doing interviews to promote his Death in Venice. “Isn't it a bit overwhelming?” I said to the great man, whose vibrant argyle socks I still remember. Visconti turned his hawklike, aristocratic face, features suitable for a fifteenth-century condotierre, to me in shock. “It is cinema, cinema, cinema, all the day long,” he said, restating the obvious for my benefit. “I love it.”
From that time to this, I have struggled to have Visconti's enthusiastic attitude toward festivals, but it has not been uniformly easy. Though they are often held in pleasant, diverting cities, too many theaters, too many deadliness, too large crowds, too much relentless hype, and too few memorable films can make these events more of an exasperating ordeal than might be imagined for a working reporter or critic.
Yet, paradoxically, it was the enormous number of cinematic celebrations overloading the world circuit that reinvigorated my interest in film festivals. I was intrigued by how many there were, how they styled themselves,