Sundance to Sarajevo. Kenneth Turan
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brochures and pamphlets from events that caught my interest, and soon I had a collection serious enough, if not for a doctoral thesis, at least for some broad general observations.
Given that there are so many of them, the key thing these multiple festivals share is a need to differentiate themselves from each other. Sometimes the boast is straightforward, if a bit narrow, like Neuchâtel's claim to be “the only Swiss film festival devoted to the bizarre and the imagination,” Toronto's Rendezvous with Madness and its focus on the myth and reality of mental illness, or the Rencontres Internationales Henri Langlois in Poitiers, France, which concentrates on film school projects, annually choosing some sixty examples from approximately three thousand short and medium-length works nominated by i40 schools.
Sometimes a festival's unifying concept is completely unexpected. The Golden Knight Slavonic Film Festival in the Ukrainian city of Kiev focuses on Slav brotherhood and Orthodox Christian values. Copenhagen's Night Film Festival annually sells 40,000 tickets despite screening all its films between midnight and 6 A.M. while, at the opposite end of the spectrum, Italy's International Giffoni Children's Film Festival recruits kids to discuss films with their directors and stars.
Occasionally the fit between subject and locale is so good that the synergy creates an international institution. Dinard, a town in France's Brittany, became so identified with its Festival of British Cinema that it placed a giant replica of the event's trophy, director Alfred Hitchcock with a bird on each shoulder, on the local boardwalk. And Cognac's devotion to thrillers and suspense films means that festival guests are politely fingerprinted in the town square and get served brandy and orange juice cocktails before screenings. In the United States, both Nantucket (“Where Screenwriters Inherit the Earth”) and Austin (“King of the Screenplay Festivals”) have made names for themselves by focusing on the underappreciated writer, with the Texas festival handing out what it calls “the coveted (and lethally heavy) Austin Film Festival Typewriter Award.”
Perhaps the oddest corner of the festival universe is the one for films that other events have scoffed at. Roger Ebert uses the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign to host an Overlooked Film Festival, and one of the several festivals at home in Santa Monica is called “Dances with Films” (motto “No Politics. No Stars. No Sh*t”), which insists its entries must have no known actors, producers, or directors or, for that matter, no money from any known company.
Most refreshingly forthright of these events is Philadelphia's baldly named Reject Film Festival, with a VCR reject button for its logo and a frank parenthetical slogan: “As if a gathering of bitter, angry artists could be called a ‘festival.’” Proud of the way it “enables filmmakers to triumph in the face of rejection,” it requires a dismissive letter from another event with its application and has become so popular, Daily Variety reports, that “the Reject Festival is not above rejection itself.”
Besides coming up with surprising concepts, festivals can also set themselves apart by the nature of the prizes they give competitors. No two festivals hand out the same award, though after taking account of things like the Golden Raven (Brussels), the Golden Frog (Torun, Poland), the Golden Calf (Utrecht), the Golden Olive (Kalamata, Greece), the Golden Orange (Antalya, Turkey), the Golden Bayard (Namur, France), the Golden Boomerang (Noosa), the Golden Alexander (Thessaloniki), and the Golden Anchor (Haifa), it does seem there is no object, either natural or man-made, that has not been gilded for presentation.
Perhaps tired of this particular gold rush, the Taos Talking Pictures Festival has gone in another direction with its top prize, the Taos Land Grant Award, which is nothing less than five acres of homestead property atop the Taos Mesa. The idea, the festival says, is “to plant media artists in the fertile soil of New Mexico” with the hope that a filmmaking community will take root and flower.
As to why so many festivals are flowering here and now, the reasons are severalfold, starting with the desire of the municipalities that host them to get their names before a wide public and attract visitors both during and after the celebration in question.
The key cause of festival proliferation, however, is a symbiotically linked trio of factors. Newly active independent and foreign-language filmmakers hunger for appreciative audiences, a need that dovetails nicely with audience members' yearning for alternatives to the standard Hollywood fare that dominates film screens not only in this country but also worldwide. And small distributors as well as national film industries locked into an unequal battle with the American juggernaut see these hungers as a not-to-be-missed opportunity to both earn money and promote their goods to the fullest extent.
For while movie fans have not lost their taste for the artistic and non-commercial, theaters are not always willing to risk showing those films. “Of course there are too many festivals,” Pierre-Henri Deleau, former head of Cannes's Directors Fortnight told Daily Variety. “People are going to them because theaters aren't doing their jobs to show films from the rest of the world.”
Festivals have become, in effect, what Piers Handling, head of the powerful Toronto Film Festival, has called “an alternative distribution network. A lot of work only gets shown now at festivals. A lot of foreign language film that would get distribution ten years ago doesn't get seen anymore.” France has been especially assiduous in using festivals around the world to get its cinema seen, and it's impossible to imagine the current critical rage for Iranian films without the intense exposure these works have gotten at Cannes, New York, and elsewhere.
Even for those films that do get seen outside festivals, the event and its high-profile gathering of critics and journalists as well as the kind of intense partisans who create word of mouth mean festivals are also useful to distributors as an inexpensive marketing tool for about-to-be released movies that can't afford to lavish tens of millions of dollars on print and television advertising.
“We'll play every regional festival we can,” Tom Bernard of Sony Pictures Classics told the New York Times. “It's all about building buzz and creating awareness. Film festivals are an alternate p.r. universe. They save us millions.” And earn millions as well. A key to the unprecedented success of Sony's Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (four Oscars and more than $100 million at the box office, a U.S. record for a subtitled picture) was its shrewd use of film festival exposure, starting with a rapturous world premier at Cannes, a brief stop at Telluride, the opinion-makers' favorite, and then a bravura capturing of the coveted audience award at Toronto.
Given this ever-expanding universe of choice, how were the dozen or so festivals profiled in this collection selected? Some, like Cannes and Sundance, were obvious choices: besides the fact that I've been going to them for a decade and more, you can't hope to understand why and how festivals function without considering the ins and outs of the biggest, brashest, and most influential of the bunch.
The other festivals investigated were not random selections. The ones I've focused on not only show films, but they also serve as picture windows onto a wider, more diverse world and cinema's place in it. Sometimes, as with Sarajevo and Havana, film is a vehicle for trying to understand the international political community's most vexing dilemmas. Sometimes, as with Burkina Faso's FESPACO and Pordenone's Giornate del Cinema Muto, it's a chance to examine the very nature of the cinematic experience. For different reasons and at different times, each of these festivals has made me feel the sense of excitement that lit up Luchino Visconti's face all those many years ago.
PART ONE
Festivals WithBusiness Agendas
Cannes
What is this thing called Cannes?
Grueling, crowded, complicated, unforgiving, it's been likened by a survivor to “a fight in a brothel during a fire.” A place where reputations are made and hearts are broken, fascinating and frustrating in equal parts, it has a love-hate relationship with Hollywood, yet gives out awards, including the Palme d'Or for best picture, that are the movie world's most coveted next to the Oscars. It's where Clint Eastwood might find himself watching — and enjoying — an Iranian film about baking bread, a place, novelist Irwin Shaw wrote, that attracted all of film: “the artists and pseudo-artists,