CAL/Meanjin Essay: A Fistful of Festivals

Feeling bored? Open a film festival. Everyone else is. Take Tilda Swinton. Not content with jetting around the world appearing in films by Jim Jarmusch, the Coen brothers and David Fincher, the British actor launched her inaugural film festival, the Ballerina Ballroom Cinema of Dreams, in her Scottish hometown of Nairns in August. Entry to the whimsically titled event was free for anyone who turned up with home-baked fairy cakes—with extra Brownie points to those who brought along tins of dried peas to rattle at the end of screenings to register approval. Explained the possibly batty (in the nicest possible way) actor, ‘One of my dearest hopes is that people see the possibility for a cinema of dreams in every abandoned corner shop in every town and village in their country.’

As if anyone needed encouragement. It sometimes appears that not only every major capital city, but every café at the end of every street of every godforsaken one-horse town has a film festival—or soon will have. According to trade publication Variety there are 5000 of them around the world, though it’s not clear how they define ‘film festival’ (does a three-day event screening material off DVD count? If so, there may be many times that number). Whatever the exact number, it’s ‘too many’, according to Rotterdam Film Festival’s former head, Sandra den Hamer. Yet existing festivals keep expanding and new ones keep making their debuts. As Fred Kramer, who runs a film festival database called Withoutabox, observes, ‘the proliferation of film festivals is not sustainable. There will be some kind of attrition very soon.’

The boom has been keenly felt in Australia. For years those venerable granddads, Melbourne International Film festival (MIFF) and Sydney Film Festival (SFF), had the local scene all to themselves, cosily sharing not only their dates but also their guests and film importation costs. At one stage their respective directors, Erwin Rado and David Stratton, even took turns in travelling overseas to source films for both events. Since then the local scene has changed dramatically, with at least 100 film festivals in existence if you include all the annual screening bashes devoted to short films, of which the most well-known, the Sydney-based Tropfest and Melbourne’s St Kilda, are but the tip of a growing iceberg.

Newly emerging events such as the dubiously named Sexy International Film Festival, which kicked off in August in Melbourne with film titles such as Give Piece of Ass a Chance and Coupling, and Dungog, held in the small NSW town (population approximately 3000) north of Newcastle, devoted to new Australian films. That’s before acknowledging the huge proliferation of annual events devoted to various national cinemas or specialist interest groups. Last November alone saw festivals devoted to Mexican, Greek, Canadian, Japanese, Jewish and Irish cinema. In other months can be found events focusing on the cinemas of France, Italy, Greece, Germany, Russia, India, the Middle East, Africa, Israel, Malaysia, Serbia, Latin American and Spain, not to mention festivals aimed at gays and lesbians, senior citizens and so on. Adelaide and Brisbane boast substantial, well-respected international film festivals, while MIFF and SFF have seen the size of their programs and attendances grow to record levels.

On the international level the competitive pressure has increased in the last four or five years due to the advent of extremely well-funded international festivals with major ambitions such as Rome, New York’s Tribeca, Dubai and Abu Dhabi. South Korea’s regional powerhouse, Pusan, is not that much older and Texan event South by South West, or SXSW, a former music festival that now encompasses several events devoted to independent film, music and new media, is on the rise. All are looking for premieres, be they international, regional or national, and stars to tread their red carpets. The trouble is, there are only so many stars available to line up for an infinite number of required photo ops, and only so many films worth screening. While Cannes appears secure in its primary position, there’s constant jockeying for position and prestige by Berlin, Venice and Toronto, all perched on the next highest rung. Appear to be slipping—as appeared to be happening this year with Venice—and one of them can quickly be judged by international film executives and media to be an event that doesn’t justify the expense of attendance. All the jostling for media coverage, the nervous looking over the shoulder at what similar festivals are doing, is not just confined to the upper echelon. It’s everywhere.

Purists may think that none of this matters, since the core function of festivals has always been to bring films to an audience that otherwise wouldn’t get a chance to see them. This is particularly true of Australia’s major festivals, which have been traditionally focused on audiences rather than industry. However, it’s becoming increasingly impossible to separate the cultural imperative from the pragmatic and commercial considerations that make these events possible. Sponsors, whether government or corporate, don’t make donations but investments in which they expect to get something back—attention, the chance to meet famous actors, prestige, advertising.

The apparent contradictions between these worldly, often vulgar impulses and the desire to promote high cinematic art are at their most glaring in Cannes, where lurid trash rubs shoulders with the work of the latest Iranian and Turkish auteurs. Yet it’s the former that makes the latter possible. For despite popular opinion, no festival ever makes a profit. They’re all subsidised. Importing hundreds of film prints from around the world for only two or three screenings, only to have to quickly export them again, is a deadly expensive business. Key factors in attracting the finance that makes it possible are urges to promote civic, national and regional film production sectors and a sense of cultural pride. It’s no accident that Cannes always has a high proportion of new French cinema in its programs and Berlin and Toronto have annual strands set aside respectively for German and Canadian films (with other examples of domestic filmmaking cropping up in their more prestigious international sections). At the same time it’s possible for an event to become too commercial. The common consensus is that Sundance, held in a Utah ski resort, has become overly commercial, leading to challenges from young upstarts Tribeca and SXSW. Where to draw the line? That’s not an easy question to answer.

Meanwhile all festivals are having to grapple with another issue. The number of films being made every year has mushroomed. Cheap digital cameras and lap-top editing software has brought filmmaking within the reach of just about anyone sufficiently determined. Fifteen years ago Sundance received 500 submissions. This year the figure was 5000. The result, sadly, has been an incremental rise in mediocrity and rubbish, much of which still needs to be sifted through by increasingly overwhelmed festival programmers, lest some rare, unheralded gem slip through undetected. And though these diamonds can be devilishly hard to find amid the cinematic muck, they are nonetheless there to be found. Two of the films I’m proudest of programming during my term as artistic director of the SFF were low-key, digitally shot features that began as graduation projects—one German, The Forest for the Trees, the other Israeli, Frozen Days. Cheaply made, they were also remarkably assured, easily superior to most films with budgets twenty times the size.

But while the supply of potential titles has multiplied, the number of standout titles seems not to have risen to anything like the same degree. Sometimes it appears the festival sector has expanded to service the rise in production. Certainly mediocre films seem to find slots on the festival circuit with alarming ease. Often all they need do is conform to a specialist theme (e.g. gay and lesbian, disability, human rights, environmental), or simply come from the right locality. For political and funding reasons, the most successful festivals have a close relationship with their local industry, which often means acting as a showcase for a broad range of the latest local productions. Much of this would be considered not worth screening under different conditions.

Closer to home, Adelaide and Melbourne have not so much moved closer to their local production industries as jumped into bed with them and pulled up the sheets. Each now administers production funds, which means that in exchange for guaranteed premiere slots, the festival agrees to make minority production investments in a series of local films. It’s a variation on Rotterdam’s Hubert Bals Fund, which has sunk production money into 600 features from the developing world since 1988. The important thing to understand, explains Mark Woods, the former head of the Irish Film Board who administers Melbourne’s fund, is that in order to thrive festivals have to ‘build their businesses’. Whether achieved via developing funding mechanisms, film markets or educational measures, these efforts can strengthen the festival ‘brand’ and deepen the relationship with government required to secure the long-term financial support needed to survive.

Significantly, Adelaide’s fund of $1 million per biennial festival was an initiative of South Australian Premier Mike Rann, not AFF. The festival was told in effect, here’s the money, get on with it—not that its director, Katrina Sedgwick, is complaining. The fund has seen the festival premiering well-regarded features by Sarah Watt (Look Both Ways), Rolf de Heer (Ten Canoes) and Kriv Stenders (Boxing Day) among others.

Meanwhile MIFF this year premiered six documentaries from local filmmakers completed with minority funding from its new, Victorian government–backed Premiere Fund, which has $3.2 million to play with over four years (next year will see the premiere of its first fiction features). This year Mark Hartley’s energetic documentary Not Quite Hollywood, about Australia’s critically reviled ‘exploitation films’ of the 1970s and 1980s, took pride of place in the festival’s opening night gala slot, where it is seems to have been warmly received.

The original idea for this production initiative, like Adelaide’s, sprang from outside the festival, in MIFF’s case a Victorian industry working party set up to examine ways of boosting the state’s then-depressed production sector. The idea came from the desire for another production ‘door’ for filmmakers declined funding by state body Film Victoria. (By comparison New South Wales seems to have historically suffered from the common misperception that the interests of film culture and production are inimical, though that finally seems to be becoming a thing of the past—see below). Adding to the sense of an industry-and-festival partnership in Melbourne are a couple of other recent industry-focused initiatives, Accelerator—a three-day think tank for local makers of short films—and 37 South, which brought together international co-financiers and local producers in ‘speed-dating’ meetings and forums for the first time this year. The latter appears to be a more modestly scaled version of the co-production markets run by larger festivals such as Berlin and Rotterdam.

It’s early days yet for MIFF’s production fund, but SFF’s chief executive, Mark Sarfaty, believes the model is flawed, since it means the festival is committing itself to screening certain titles before knowing how they’ll turn out. ‘It’s an enterprise activity that has very uncertain outcomes,’ he says. There again, Sarfaty admits that by effectively ‘buying premieres’, MIFF is also effectively making it harder for Sydney to program new Australian films.

Sydney has opted for a different model: the launch this year of a long-mooted international feature competition with a $60,000 cash prize for best film. The aim is to raise the festival’s status and profile, both nationally and internationally, and give it extra bargaining power in negotiating for some of the circuit’s more in-demand titles. That includes Australian titles—at least those that haven’t already been chalk-marked for premieres down south—with two new local features among the dozen titles competing for the cash prize in this year’s inaugural competition. The prize went to IRA prison story Hunger—widely received as the kind of credible choice the competition desperately needed in its first year—but local production Three Blind Mice also received a special mention.

Accompanying the competition is extra funding from the NSW government to bring out more guests, especially for competition films, and a program to formally bring them together in meetings with local industry figures. This year the festival hosted forty-eight international guests, double the previous year’s number. As with MIFF’s new model, it’s too early to say what effect the new strategy will have. As former SFF artistic director Stratton has noted, claims made during the media launch that the competition would put Sydney on a par with Cannes, Venice and Berlin lack credibility, given that nobody in the film trade expects well-established and handsomely financed competitive festivals such as Locarno (Switzerland), Karlovy Vary (Czech Republic) and San Sebastian (Spain) to ever be in a position to challenge Europe’s big three. Also questionable is the focus on red carpet gala events for every competition film. This worked when the festival bagged Jack Black to appear for a local premiere of the animation Kung Fu Panda. More often it meant a clutch of publicists holding mobiles and clipboards while standing on an otherwise strangely empty red carpet, waiting for a relatively unknown Mexican director to arrive. The decision to focus on glamour makes sense in the glitzy harbour city; the question is, how to pull it off credibly? For all that the competition has already had a positive effect on the festival’s profile, and the extra funding would appear to have helped to secure the festival more firmly.

If you haven’t worked it out from the above, the sense of competition between MIFF and SFF, while friendly on the surface, seems to be every bit as keenly felt as the legendary rivalry between their host cities. The difference is that where Victoria’s competition is fed by resentment at what many Melburnians feel is its unfair underdog status, with the festivals it’s the other way around, with Sydney playing the underdog role.

The widespread acknowledgment of MIFF’s position as the nation’s most influential and prestigious film festival dates most clearly from the mid 1990s, when then-director Tait Brady broke away from the parallel programming dates with SFF and moved the event back by six weeks to late July and early August. The aim was to take advantage of the latest hot titles from Cannes, which runs in May, and build a separate identity. Brady complained that the New South Wales–based national media had always given SFF credit for prestige titles and guests shared by both. At the same time Brady did one other very smart thing: he moved the centre of the festival from inner-suburban St Kilda to the city centre, where it was perfectly placed to take advantage of the formerly languishing CBD’s regeneration as a shopping and after-hours leisure centre. For more than a decade MIFF has been blessed with an unusually well-placed series of venues, all within short walking distance of one another and in an area packed with cafes, bars and restaurants. All of this has helped to create that undefinable but infectious festival atmosphere that attracts audiences and makes them want to come back.

Brady’s moves presaged a period of enormous growth for the festival under subsequent directors Sandra Sdraulig and James Hewison. MIFF’s 2003 event alone saw attendances rise by a hefty 17 per cent. This year it achieved an attendance of 185,000—a modest rise of 1.5 per cent over the previous year—making it the nation’s most popular film event by far.

Sydney’s audiences have also grown over the previous decade, though the gains have been slightly uneven and generally more modest. This year it racked up an attendance of 135,000, matching the previous year’s record figures—certainly nothing to be ashamed of. The worry is that the roughly 25–30 per cent increase in the number of screenings introduced in 2007, and new programming initiatives aimed at broadening the audience (e.g. strands devoted to kids’ and disabled themes) have not significantly expanded the audience. More or less the same number of people are being spread more thinly.

Certainly Sydney cineastes have every right to feel jealous of Melbourne’s audiences. At MIFF it’s not unusual to see packed-out 600-seat auditoriums for obscure or difficult-sounding films, reflecting the city’s long-standing position as the Australian screen culture capital. It’s no accident that Federation Square’s expensive-to-run Australian Centre for the Moving Image, or ACMI—a ground-breaking combination of cinematheque, screen-art/video installation gallery and educational facility—was able to beat the odds and get off the ground in Victoria, while Sydney’s plans during the 1990s for a cinematheque attached to the Museum of Contemporary Art came to nothing, despite the high profile support of Mad Max and Babe filmmaker George Miller. Stratton recalls in his memoir I Peed on Fellini that after being approached to head the SFF in the mid 1960s he was advised by some that he should be looking to MIFF instead as it was a better resourced, more advanced festival organisation, whereas SFF still basically operated as a large film society.

Film society origins are common to many of the older film festivals but the clubbiness of SFF’s origins have dogged the organisation. Being able to enjoy the patronage of a loyal group of regulars, many of whom know each other and love sharing their experiences, is a plus. But it can also alienate people outside the club and lead to perceptions of an elitist event disengaged from the wider community (not an image that encourages politicians or sponsors to cough up). The differing expectations and habits of SFF’s older subscribers and newer, more casual festival-goers appears deeply inscribed. A reluctance during the mid 1990s to tackle what was then a subscription-only ticket policy, just as MIFF was starting to pull ahead with more open ticketing and a broader spread of venues and programming, hobbled the festival. It had an arduous struggle to get back on track before entering its more optimistic phase.


As for the future, no festival has cause for complacency. A strange irony of the filmfest boom is that we’re in an age where films, especially the foreign and cult titles that are the traditional stock in trade of these events, have never been more accessible. This is thanks to a multitude of delivery and distribution systems including DVD, pay TV stations such as World Movies and Turner Classic Movies, amazon.com, YouTube and—whisper it—illegal downloads. Today you can literally duck out to the local mall to buy a litre of milk and find yourself coming back owning a fistful of once hard-to-see 1970s US thrillers at six dollars a pop and a two-disc set of Italian neo-realist classics for a mere fifteen dollars. New viewing devices such as video iPods and iPhones and the advent of viewer-generated content are revolutionising the way people access and relate to the moving image. And thanks to the growth of giant flat-screen televisions, HD digital broadcasting, Blu-ray DVD and home theatre systems with surround sound, the gap between the cinema and home film-viewing experience has narrowed enormously. So why the increasing popularity of what might appear to be an essentially old-fashioned, twentieth-century institution? How do festivals need to adapt in order to survive and prosper well into the twenty-first century’s digital era?

Already there is talk of the need for ‘digital film festivals’, where films can be downloaded instead of projected in cinemas. This seems to be missing the point. Film festivals are never just about showing films. They’re about the collective experience, appealing to our instinctive need for gregariousness and sense of community. Sarfaty says the SFF is looking at ways to include material produced for new delivery systems, including short films made for mobile phone. There’s no point in showing this on the big screen, he says, because it will look terrible. Indeed both Sydney and Adelaide already have competitions for best short film shot on a mobile. But these kinds of initiatives seem an addition to the traditional festival experience, not a replacement. Digital projection is another development, one with the potential to bypass the murderously expensive freight charges the festivals have had to endure. Sarfaty says SFF’s research shows most festivals are dragging their heels on the issue, though the organisation is working to establish digital standards to help guide producers towards completing their films in festival-friendly formats.

It’s no accident that the trend towards downloading music coincides with a huge rise worldwide in the popularity of live music. Filmfests, for all their worship of two-dimensional images, are essentially live events—they have more in common with arts festivals than they do with cinemas. That the overwhelming majority of the audience usually stays behind to participate in post-screening Q&As with filmmakers indicates the special qualities of the festival experience. Some of my fondest memories of festivals are of live Q&As—Rolf de Heer at SFF giving a detailed exposition of the extraordinary cultural and physical obstacles he had to traverse in making Ten Canoes, for instance; Mike Leigh discussing the making of Secrets and Lies. A director’s commentary on a DVD lacks the same immediacy, that sense that you, the viewer, are actually or potentially part of the discussion.

Even queuing can be an essential aspect of the festival experience; not, admittedly in Sydney, where patrons often regard the festival administration as hopelessly incompetent if they have to queue for more than ten minutes. Travel to festivals around the world and you quickly notice that queues—for tickets, to gain access to venues—indicate an event in good health. It’s when nobody wants to queue for tickets that you have a problem. Talking to Toronto director Piers Handling three years ago, I was amazed to hear him describe the way the festival had one year introduced a new system to cut down on queues. The festival had so much negative feedback that he quickly went back to the old, queue-friendly method. The long lines are where festival-goers meet old friends and make new ones, swap tips on which titles are worth seeing and avoiding, even occasionally start romantic relationships. MIFF’s executive director, Richard Moore, has observed a similar phenomenon in Melbourne.

The most common criticism of MIFF and SFF these days is that the programs have become so large that they overwhelm the potential viewer. Some say they feel paralysed by what they see as the excess of choice. They’d prefer the festivals be stricter in their curatorial standards, funnel the viewer towards the best on offer. But if the programs are larger than they were in the 1960s and 1970s, it reflects the way that audiences have changed. No longer is there a single, relatively homogenous audience that turns out annually to see a certain type of art house film. Successful festivals now address diverse tastes and sensibilities. To include, say, martial arts films, music documentaries, horror and children’s programming, events need bigger programs to accommodate them. Nonetheless the critics still have a strong point: Moore says he originally intended to reduce MIFF’s size this year from 250 to 230 features but ended up increasing the program to 280—an enormous number by any festival’s standards. ‘To be frank, we got a bit carried away this year’, he admits, adding that the festival could make its program ‘a bit sharper’ by cutting back on some of its more sprawling sections.

What, then, of the persistent complaint that festival programs feature too many films destined for commercial distribution? The simple answer is that it’s easy to avoid them: if a familiar-sounding name such as that of Dendy, Palace or Madman appears in the small print of the program notes, it means the film will later appear at the very least on DVD and in many cases also in cinemas. In any case, watching a film in a festival is not like seeing it in release, as Tilda Swinton, with her tins of dried peas and fairy cakes, understands. The sense of occasion, often packed cinemas, the presence of filmmakers, the ability to measure films against each other, significantly enhances the experience. The fact is that virtually all festivals worldwide act as showcases for the best work they can find—and much of that work is in commercial distribution or will be bought as a result of festival screenings. Without distributed titles the festivals would become more elite. Lacking the drawcards that appeal to sponsors, government and a more general film-loving public, it’s hard to see how they could survive financially.

Last year Australian distributors decided to play tough and demand screening fees from all festivals. The latter, feeling they had little choice, caved in, negotiating deals generally based on a percentage of the box office. The result was yet more financial pressure. Yet far from cutting back on distributed films this year, the major events went ahead with as many distributed titles as ever. Moore says the arrangement has given certainty to both festivals and distributors, who have often declined to offer more specialised titles, fearing they’d be burning up the films’ limited audiences without recompense.

For all the pressures on them—financial, technological, increased rivalry—festivals that respond strategically and adapt to changing circumstances are likely to thrive. The main reason is that independent and art house cinema is in commercial crisis around the globe. Titles that used to be assured of a cinema audience are dying. Because the old release patterns are no longer working, distributors are likely to look to the festivals as part of their launch strategies even more than they do already. And because fewer titles will be bought for cinema distribution, the festivals will retain their core role of screening aesthetically interesting work otherwise difficult to see on the big screen. Festivals will remain a bulwark against Hollywood-led blockbuster aesthetics and homogenisation, an important avenue of discovery where viewers will continue to give themselves permission to take risks, to broaden and deepen their experience and appreciation of cinema.