Distribution Advocates Presents: The Truth About Film Festivals (Episode 3)
Are film festivals still havens of discovery, dealmaking, and connection for filmmakers?
We examine the functions of the film festival system and interrogate whether its promises reign true. This episode features conversations with Kaila Sarah Hier,
, Jemma Desai (), and .Listen on Spotify, Apple Podcasts, Amazon Music, and iHeartRadio.
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
Kaila Sarah Hier:
I am Kaila Sarah Hier. I’m a film publicist, working a lot in genre films and smaller independent films.
The festival is literally just the first step. How you want the first impression of this movie to be, how you want distributors to see it, how you want to court the future audience down the way. This is a long-term game. It’s a constant catch-22 of you need the buzz to get the distributor, but you need the festival to get the buzz, and it just feels like everybody’s in a situation where we don’t have enough of what we need.
Avril Speaks:
Hello out there, and welcome to Distribution Advocates Presents. I am your host, Avril Speaks, producer, filmmaker, and co-founder of Distribution Advocates. Our team has commissioned this series of conversations, where we delve into concerns about the current landscape of independent film distribution. We’ll chat with folks who are navigating these spaces, debunk some outdated myths, and look to innovative, sustainable, and equitable solutions for distributing films to their waiting audiences.
As we expected, it was difficult to find filmmakers willing to speak about film festivals on the record, so we decided on a different approach. For this episode, we’ve invited two veteran industry professionals to take an open and honest look at the landscape. As you listen, please be aware that these interviews were recorded in October 2023.
Let’s start off with the lay of the land, from producer and former Tribeca Film Institute executive director, Amy Hobby.
Amy Hobby:
I’m Amy Hobby. I’m a film producer. I’m also a co-founder of Distribution Advocates.
As it relates to our conversation today, I’ve had at least seven films premiere at Sundance, and also have premiered films at Toronto, SXSW, Tribeca, Hot Docs, Berlin, Cannes and so on, and I’ve sold films at those festivals, and I’ve not sold films at those festivals. I think I’ll largely be speaking about things from the perspective of a veteran producer.
Avril Speaks:
And you were also the architect behind the data collection and visualization project that Distribution Advocates did on film festivals. So from your perspective, as a veteran producer who has been to several film festivals and you’ve seen the shift in the landscape of film festivals, can you give us an overview of the landscape as it operates today, from your point of view?
Amy Hobby:
Yeah. Currently, from the perspective of an independent producer, you put all your efforts, almost singularly, into getting into one of the handful of elite festivals, so you have a shot at selling your film. When I say selling, it’s actually licensing rights. It’s what a film team aspires to, to be legitimized, to launch a director’s career, to get access to executives, be part of a club, get reviewed, have the laurels on your poster, and basically help the film stand out from the pack.
If you ask most independent producers, with a film that was funded with all rights intact, meaning owned by the film team, I don’t know if many of them could name an alternative plan to reach audiences. This is their plan. “We’re going to make the film and we’re going to get into Sundance or…” It’s been that way for a long time. Even after knowing that this plan is so hard to achieve—that it would be easier to get into Harvard, go pro in the NBA—still, this is the plan.
Avril Speaks:
That game plan of playing festivals, that notion that that’s the only plan, where does that come from?
Amy Hobby:
I don’t know. I think there are no other case studies or viable options that people know about, so you keep latching onto that one thing you know. If you told these filmmakers, “Well, you’ll make more money and you’ll also be eligible for awards. You’ll get into the system this other way,” I think people will be open to it. Do you know where that comes from?
Avril Speaks:
This is something that I’ve been thinking about a lot lately, especially in the last couple of years. We’ve come to believe that that’s the only way to break in. Even for myself, the past couple of years as I’ve gone to Sundance or gone to summits, labs, that kind of thing, I’m like, there’s a lot of people in this industry who are not here. You know what I mean? People who are working, people who have films, working in television, working in film, doing their thing, who are not at this festival, or who are not at this lab, and who are not at this summit. Whether they want to be or not, they are not here and they’re still working.
I think there’s this idea that “I’m going to be the exception.” There’s a lot of filmmakers I interact with that, if you present an alternative, it’s almost as if saying, you’re not good enough for Sundance. And it’s not even about being good enough or not, it’s about what makes the most sense, strategy-wise, for what you’re trying to put out there.
Amy Hobby:
I’m going to agree with you and add to that. I think if you are going to be someone who makes an independent film outside the system, I think you have to believe you’re exceptional to get through that process. You have to just believe, beyond reasonable doubt, that you’re going to get this done. If you get through that process, you have that mindset, or you’ve cultivated that mindset, and that mindset will continue. “I’m going to get this done. I am the exceptional one.” You have to wake up every day and say, “I can do this.” You have to convince yourself, so there is a sense of exceptionalism.
Avril Speaks:
I think it goes back to something that we always say at Distribution Advocates, and it’s the first thing that’s on the cheat sheet. It’s knowing your value and knowing your worth. So people think they’re the exceptions in terms of, well, I can get into Sundance, but if you take that same energy and believe in your worth and believe in the value of yourself and of your film and the product that you have, take that into the process of distribution and not just settle for anything or just settle for less. I wonder how that would change the system.
Amy Hobby:
I think people need to see what the alternatives are and build alternative value systems.
I posed this question at Camden and we posted this on the Distribution Advocates Substack: “If you could premiere your film at Sundance, or have a million people watch your film on YouTube, what do you choose? What are your values?” It’s a simplistic question, but the connection to audience—who your audience is, the focus as a filmmaker on audience—has been lost through this process. Because when you go to an A-list festival, you’re looking for validation. You’re looking for an entryway into the system. Robert Redford bought the US Film Festival [and renamed it Sundance] as a place to cultivate independent filmmaking, outside the Hollywood system, as someone who worked in the system and was starting to make some films outside the system.
So now, you’re a funder. You’re an investor. You’re a filmmaker. You’re getting your funding from nonprofit organizations or investors. You do all of this to maintain your independent voice and maintain your final cut. And then you’re going to this independent film festival to buy and find your way back into the system. That’s kind of interesting, right? That’s the goal is to get back into the system.
Over the years, there’s been more corporate involvement. The festivals are part of the system too. They need to lure buyers who are also corporate sponsors. They need the money to continue putting on the festival. It’s a tough business on their end too. There’ve always been buyers at the A-list festivals, as far back as I can remember, and I’ve been premiering films for a long time at festivals. And there were bidding wars in the 1990s. Harvey Weinstein and all the other middle-aged white guys who ran distribution at the time, they would be in the back of the theater, and one of them would run out and get on their phone, call their office, and the other one would get worried that Harvey was in the lobby. So there was that vibe. That core thing was there.
But more recently, there were a ton of new buyers, streamers, broadcasters. Suddenly, there was a ton of cash that flooded into Sundance, making some stupid big deals. Filmmakers see these. They’re exceptions, but you still think, “Oh, that could be me.” And still, there’s no backup plan, no real thought about how you’ll reach audiences if you don’t get into that festival. It’s sort of a marketing play and a potentially expensive one if you are an independent film team. For example, you could spend $40,000 taking a film to Sundance, maybe more at Cannes or less at Tribeca—but it’s expensive.
We desperately need other paths for circulating our films and finding audience besides festivals. Can you imagine a film team saying, “We got into Sundance, but actually, we’re going to skip it for this film, because our audience is somewhere else and we can use the $40,000 to market to that audience. And we’ll get a revenue share from those screenings, and we’ll sort of build from the ground up.” And this is not to necessarily blame the festivals because it’s a flaw of the ecosystem. The festivals should not be a business plan or central strategy to connect with your eventual audience or recoup an investment. It shouldn’t have been a business model to start with.
Avril Speaks:
I want to pull that apart, because there are scenarios where film festivals help do that in terms of identifying an audience and getting a film out to audiences. Let’s parse this out and let’s take that part first, how are film festivals helpful in that sense, in terms of what they do for films, and then we can kind of parse out the other side of that coin.
Amy Hobby:
Well, I’m going to give you an example. I have a film that I produced about Sam Shepard called Shepard & Dark [2012]. And that film screened at the Cleveland Film Festival.
The Cleveland Film Festival is fantastic. They have a huge audience, local participation, people showing up, going to the films. The Cleveland Film Festival connected us with not one, but two local theaters to be our co-sponsor presenting partners. Those people reached out to their base and got Sam Shepard fans, theater fans, an unlikely spillover, to come and sell out our screenings. And that was the dream audience for us. They stayed. They asked smart questions at the Q&A. It was a really great way for us to understand and test our dream audience, right?
So when I say film festivals, it’s tough. You have to tease that out. What is a festival versus a market? What is the intent behind the festival? Who are they curating for? So yeah, it’s a little more complicated.
Avril Speaks:
Well, and we can also take it even a step further in parsing out the enduring myth of career and financial gain that’s to be had from film festivals. I mean, what would you say are the flaws in that system?
Amy Hobby:
If you’re one of 5% or less that get into one of the A-list festivals, then you have less than that percent to sell your film at that festival. It’s not a business strategy. There needs to be a huge mind shift around why we go to festivals and what sort of festivals we choose to premiere at, or if we need festivals at all. It’s not for every film.
Avril Speaks:
Do you have any examples of films that didn’t go through the festival channel that were successful in their own right? What happened with the Sam Shepard film?
Amy Hobby:
That film was not bought at a festival. That film showed at some second-tier festivals that were great— community festivals that had an audience for Sam Shepard. It was programmed into festivals like that. I know some of the distributors. So that film sold because I was talking about it to a distributor that I knew and just had a conversation. So I have access to other paths that other filmmakers might not. So the answer is, yes, I have examples of that, but, no, it doesn’t apply to everyone.
But I do have a film that I am hoping to do totally outside the system, but we need to test it and do case studies on it.
Avril Speaks:
I think one of the flaws with the film festival system is that, film festivals right now kind of serve as a gatekeeper, would you say?
Amy Hobby:
Yes. The question is, are they programming for buyers? Or are they programming for their community? Who are they curating for? Some festivals need to lure corporate sponsors. And again, it’s the ecosystem. Some of those corporate sponsors are also buyers, streamers, etc. They bring money, assets, executives, lounges, tents to the festival as sponsors. And then there’s an expectation that you’ll have programmed films where rights are available, that might be perceived as buyable in the marketplace, so it sort of feeds itself in a way.
One thing that might be interesting to think about is, is there a way to separate out the curated part of a festival and the market part of a festival? Because if the curated part is acting like a market, does that compromise the curation? It is an interesting question. How are you curating for the Hollywood system, for the corporate sponsors, so that there’s something to be bought there? If they curated 90% experimental films, would all of those people go away? Probably. So what’s the give and take there?
If you go to Berlin or Cannes or some of the European festivals, there’s a separate area that’s the market, and that allows distributors to have screenings. There are separate screenings that are for buyers.
Avril Speaks:
Well, here in the US, we have Gotham Film Week and we have AFM.
Amy Hobby:
But AFM is like a hardcore market. Filmmakers should not go to AFM.
Avril Speaks:
But that’s what makes me think. We don’t really have markets like that outside of film festivals, so what is the place to go for that kind of access? I feel like a lot of this comes down to access.
Amy Hobby:
Well, maybe it doesn’t have to come down to access specifically. I wonder if festivals and the acquisition structure have amplified that paradigm altogether. There’s so many other paths for films to take. Festivals are expensive, and you could use that money to go straight to a theatrical marketing campaign, or do an ad-driven release on YouTube, or change the focus from festival submissions to make audience outreach and audience insight your priority. Instead of starting the spreadsheet of festivals to apply to, compile a list of who your champions will be. Who’s going to love your film? Where are they talking to each other? Is that on Discord and an office lunchroom or at a political rally? If you know your audience and have built out a marketing plan, your film can, at that point, have more value to a distributor going into the marketplace.
There’s other options to get the film onto transactional and streaming. It doesn’t have to be through a big distributor acquisition. It could be through an aggregator or part of a larger strategy. Get out there. Skip Sundance. Find your audience and have a good time.
Avril Speaks:
Just as Amy pointed out the value of community-based film festivals, publicist Kaila Hier also explains how the size of film festivals affects film criticism and publicity.
Kaila Sarah Hier:
I’ve predominantly done PR stuff for genre festivals, B-minus to B-plus kind of festivals, but there is a massive benefit. Many of these journalists there have more freedom. When journalists are going to TIFF or Sundance, there’s a lot of being on assignment, so they’re only able to cover what their editors want them to cover, which will be the bigger films that have distribution or have stars attached. But when a journalist is hitting one of these lesser-scale kind of events, they’re fully just able to do what they want, and that can lead to some really amazing engagement.
I’ve been lucky enough to work with a lot of these journalists for numerous years, and they repeatedly mentioned Fantasia as being the festival where they find their favorite movies of the year, because they’re able to just follow their gut and see what they want. And these will be journalists that write for rogerebert.com or Film School Rejects, or outlets that are quite important and influential and might not be the Hollywood Reporters of the world, but I think are important in a lot of ways to getting your film actually spoken about.
I think that part of the responsibility of putting on a festival like Fantasia, they have so many premieres by emerging filmmakers, to continue that relationship and maintain the festival status. They pay for the flights and the hotels for journalists, and then that helps to create a more positive and supportive ecosystem in a continuously uninhabitable state of the industry.
You look at these big festivals and every trade is listed as a media sponsor. We all know what that means. It’s not all just about passion anymore. Everything seems to have some kind of a price tag.
Avril Speaks:
Distribution Advocates co-founder Abby Sun sat down with former festival programmer, Jemma Desai, discussing the same issues about our value systems as filmmakers, as they relate to film festivals.
Jemma Desai:
I’m Jemma. I’m a writer, a recovering programmer, and I’m currently undertaking a practice-based PhD with a thesis entitled “What Do We Want from Each Other After We’ve Told Our Stories?”.
Abby Sun:
This personal journey that you went on, and being a recovering film festival programmer, can you just tell us a little bit about your arc? And perhaps also, what you thought you were doing as a film festival programmer, why you joined that world and stayed in it for so long? And perhaps now, what you think you were doing and actually upholding?
Jemma Desai:
I didn’t come through film school, so I wasn’t coming to it in the way that I know that some people come to it, which was from a body of knowledge. I didn’t feel like I was the keeper of knowledge in that sense, but I did come to it through a love of watching films. I also came to it from a cultural studies background, so really thinking about, what does culture do in society, how it’s affecting us, what it might tell us about the world in the current moment.
I thought I was learning. I was teaching myself about film culture. I thought I was sharing. I thought I was creating opportunities for others to see work that they wouldn’t normally see. And I thought I was doing that in quite a neutral way, just this idea of giving and receiving.
I had a really neutral understanding of my work, but also, I was really enjoying the work that I was doing, in the sense of learning about things that I would never normally learn about, watching films that I would never have access to. I worked at the BFI and I could have free tickets to any program. So I was staying every night and watching films. That was really valuable to me. I really wanted that.
Abby Sun:
What you’re describing is really the platonic ideal of film programming, the audience development work that you’re doing, and also on a personal creative enjoyment, educational level. I think a lot of people are able to ignore the excesses or the contradictions of our field, in order to enjoy those personal benefits. Because there’s nothing else like introducing a film or hosting a Q&A after a screening to a rapturous audience that’s just experienced something great with the filmmakers there beside you, right?
Jemma Desai:
Yeah. I wasn’t aware at all. I didn’t come from a deeply politicized family, so I don’t think I really understood about the practice of doing politics in the everyday. That is a really interesting realization that I’ve come to. Of course, I then believed in what a film festival could do because my sense of politics was quite abstract and not practiced, and I think that’s really what the film festival world is. The sort of cultural sector and the arts industries really is kind of like this space where politics is really abstracted and we can consume it and think that we’re doing something by watching or sharing. But actually, there isn’t a lot of discussion about what that really amounts to in our practices.
Abby Sun:
Even that structure, the screening followed by post-screening Q&A, the drive to eventize everything in film festivals—these are things that you are critiquing at a rather fundamental level these days. But I’m wondering if maybe you can highlight some of the contradictions that you now see in what a film festival demands of its makers, the people who show films there, but also of its workers.
Jemma Desai:
What I realized is that directors, audiences, artists, programmers, we all have desires that feed into the form that we have right now. This isn’t something that has abstractly appeared and we’re just all kind of doing it and there’s no way out. There are things that keep these things in place because we want certain things.
Directors want prizes. Audiences want celebrity and glamor, on whatever level. For some people, celebrity is Greta Gerwig, and for some people, celebrity is Pedro Costa. We want this level of access to genius. Artists want validation. Programmers want validation too. They want this platonic ideal that you spoke about—to hold onto that. And the moment that we start examining these processes, we have to give things up. That’s where this question of do we really want the things that we say that we do came from.
Abby Sun:
One of the things that people want from film festivals, I would say both people who attend film festivals and people who work at them, and also filmmakers, is this enduring myth that film festivals might lead to distribution offers, that it might lead to commercial, theatrical or streaming distribution paths, and that in the absence of an offer that is handed to the filmmakers – very, very passive language here – film festivals are the only distribution circuits left. What do you think about that?
Jemma Desai:
Recently, I did a performance lecture called “Yearning for New Ways to Make and Circulate.” In the conversations that I was having with a producer called Luke Moody, we started to talk about the contractual language of distribution, and we talked about the language of exploitation, like exploiting rights.
I think there’s something in there about what really is happening at the film festival. There’s a lot of colonial language in the film festival and in the idea of distribution, and there’s a lot of ideas of extracting, of exploring, so I think it’s really interesting that the presentation of the film festival is this idea of hospitality and guests, but actually, when the business is done, it’s all about exploitation. It’s all about territories and rights, and it’s very law-like language. There’s this clash. You’re attracted to this neoliberal idea of hospitality, but actually, what’s happening is that you’ll only be needed if you can be exploited. That’s a big thing that I’ve been thinking with recently, but more materially and less abstractly maybe.
The film festival is just a trade fair, isn’t it? But I don’t know that filmmakers always know that, and I think it’s presented as this opportunity to make connections based on the work that you’ve made, but it’s never really about that. It’s always about who you know. It’s about what you’ve done before. It might be what passport you have. It might be what labs you’ve been in, or it might be how you have managed to internalize the right language. It might be who your father is. It could be so many different things that allow you to have that door open, so I actually don’t know what the function of a film festival is in terms of distribution for most filmmakers who don’t have the backing of a studio or a big name producer. Maybe there are others that have felt something of value, but at present, I just don’t know where that possibility really lies at a film festival.
Avril Speaks:
Every filmmaker wants to reach an audience and be able to make an impact, whether it’s through action, social impact, monetary or what have you. But looking at this festival system, can it truly deliver on any of those fronts with the way things currently stand? Abby and Jemma discuss this possibility as well.
Abby Sun:
Can you just tell us a little bit about “This Work Isn’t For Us?”
Jemma Desai:
“This Work Isn’t For Us” is a body of work that I did a few years ago, where I was really thinking about, I guess, the embodied reality of trying to deliver work that’s centered my political concerns and my embodied concerns in structures that aren’t really concerned with that, and that circulated during a time where people were really interested in personal stories of marginalization. “This Work Isn’t For Us” isn’t a piece of institutional critique. It may read as such to some people, but for me, it was a document of trauma, moving through hostile spaces and really believing that my presence there could do something and then realizing that it couldn’t.
So as much as I was having a really great time learning about films and sharing films and that kind of immediacy of speaking to the filmmaker, the immediacy of the audience, all of that was enjoyable, I was also experiencing a sense of hostility of certain spaces that were hostile to me, a very heightened sort of awareness of how gentrified that space was, how elitist that space was, so really just thinking that I had accidentally been allowed access to this space and I couldn’t see anyone really like me. I was working in a film festival in London, which is a city that I was born in and grew up in, but this was a very gentrified space, middle class space. And I was starting to really notice that on an embodied level.
So you talk about the Q&A, and sometimes there would be this interruption of relation with the filmmaker because a filmmaker might want someone more important than you, or the publicist would be there and they would give you their coat to hold because they wouldn’t ever think that you were the person that was doing the Q&A. There were just these moments where you just sort of see the hierarchy in place.
I started to unpick that, and that was at a time when Get Out [2017] was in cinemas, and I had this really visceral experience. I wrote about it in this short piece before I wrote “This Work Isn’t For Us” called “The Arts Are in the Sunken Place: How Do We Get Out?” I really thought about it from sitting in the cinema and NFT1, which is a big cinema at the BFI, the most beautiful cinema in London, they were showing a preview of Get Out. And somehow, I don’t know how they did it, they actually had brought what I recognized as London into that space. It felt like the whole of South London was in that space. It was a really Black and brown audience.
But what I noticed was that, for a section of the audience, the audience became the spectacle, and it was this real sense of how the space remembered who it really belonged to, even though there was this space being claimed by this audience. That started off a lot of thinking around, what am I doing this for? Who is it for? Who does it mean something to? Do I belong here? About what the value of these spaces of exchange really are.
Abby Sun:
I think, oftentimes, a lot of these things, even the spectacle itself, is justified on behalf of the filmmakers, but we’re putting on public events for an audience of some sort, however we define that, and sometimes that gets lost in the shuffle.
Jemma Desai:
Yeah. I’m interested in this idea of the public as well and what relation that is. I work mostly in the UK, but there is a sense that if you have a public building, then the public will come. But film festivals and cultural institutions are often a closed loop. They act as a kind of configuration of domination that presents itself as a redistributive effort. They say that they have open doors, but there are certain modes of being that they expect. And I’ve been reading this book by Ethan Philbrick called Group Works [2023], and he talks about how neoliberalism absorbs resistance by presenting its own form of group sociality, like co-working, brainstorming, team building. And I think, sometimes, film screenings in fancy institutions and also film festivals are a bit like this too. It’s like a form of community that is not really about openness or communion or real relation, but it’s about consumption and gentrification.
I think that’s really what I’m thinking through now. What is the form of relation in these spaces? Because it’s not just that you’re inviting the public in and that this is a public space, it’s really about who is gathered by your invitation. Kaguru Macharia, this brilliant Kenyan scholar, asks that question, and I sit with that a lot when I think about my curatorial work, what kind of invitation is this event expressing, and therefore, the terms of that invitation gathers a certain kind of person. This idea of public, I want to trouble it a little bit because it’s not neutral either.
Abby Sun:
Absolutely. I’d love for you to dig into this provocation that you’ve been issuing for filmmakers and those of us who work in the industry. Because recently, as you mentioned, there’s been this kind of groundswell of interest in performing, perhaps, if we can use that word, performing film festivals in particular, to make them more diverse, to make them more equitable, more inclusive, more accessible. Those are the words that we hear. The provocation that you’ve been issuing is to really question, how much do we want what we say that we want? You have written about this. You have participated in industry events and forums and panels about all of this. I would say, in some circles, it’s been very well received. And then in other circles, it’s almost like your question has been ignored by the other voices in the room.
Can you walk us through what you’re questioning? What is it that we say that we want, and why should we maybe question it when it comes to film festivals?
Jemma Desai:
Yeah. I think this question started coming into my mind after I had done “This Work Isn’t For Us” and I had resigned from my institutional jobs at the BFI and at British Council, which functioned as this space where I could really think it’s the institution that’s a problem because they were really hostile for change. Institutions are calcified spaces and they privilege ossification rather than change, and I really thought that when I would move out of that space that there would be all this possibility.
Then I was given all this possibility in a way, and I led the programming of a wonderful film festival in the UK called Berwick Film & Media Arts Festival. There was a possibility to question everything there. Peter Taylor, who’s the director there, was really open to us looking at the language of the film festival, looking at the structure of it, to us redistributing resources. But what I really hadn’t accounted for was desire, and what I mean by that is that certain things stay the same because we’re attached to a certain way of being.
We also need to practice things in community, right? We looked at language, for instance. We looked at why are we attached to this language of criminal justice like the jury. We also looked at the language of submission. What is this power dynamic that simply... I found that it was fine to draw awareness to it in some context, but that actually, alone, drawing awareness to it didn’t shift anything at all, because you needed a lot of people to move at the same time and you needed everyone to examine their attachments.
This experience also at the film festival was like, I need a community of practice. I need people who also want to do this with me. And so asking that a question isn’t supposed to be, you don’t really want what you say that you want. It was more like, can we all examine this together? Really think about this idea of what is a community of practice? Where can I find it? I think a community of practice is maybe gathered by the things that are said and cannot be gathered by the things that are left unsaid.
Recently, I’ve been speaking to so many filmmakers who, they’re on the festival circuit, and they’re constantly posting on social about where they’ve been, the screenings they’ve done, and then I’m just having conversations with them about how terrible their experiences have been, how they had to pay for themselves to go, or they only paid for a little bit or they forgot to pay their film. But actually, the story that’s told externally is constantly of, “I got my film shown to rapturous audiences and it was great, and I’m so grateful to this festival for showing my film.” There’s this sense that it’s actually deeply lonely. Even though it’s a place of coming together, it’s also a very isolating space because of the terms in which you are invited in.
There’s this dissonance that we’re all playing into that we think that visibility is that only currency that we have, because we have a form that is visible. But there are other forms of relation that I want to be able to think with that distribution might be able to let us think with. I think the film festival colonizes our imagination in terms of that, because it shows us the epitome of success is this kind of spectacle. It’s not the small community screening that maybe you gave your film over for free.
Abby Sun:
It almost seems like film festivals actually hurt the distribution and acquisition potential of films, if it’s not already pre-sold as a path to get to the film festival in the first place. I think that they are really wonderful spectacles and events for many people who attend them, who are looking for that prestige factor, whether they are looking for the Greta Gerwig or Pedro Costas of the world. And I think for filmmakers, it allows them to feel less alone because it’s such a solitary sport in so many ways.
But I think that part of that is the walls that we’ve built for ourselves. There’s no reason that says that we shouldn’t be working communally and collaboratively and relationally and not, in my opinion, still quite extractive co-creation modes of working, but truly thinking about what we want to share with each other.
Jemma Desai:
I want to go back to that thing of desire. If there was any advice to filmmakers about how they could navigate this, it would be to think about what matters to you, and I say that to everybody in the film industry.
I think that the film festival is a mirror of what matters to us right now. It’s a mirror of our collective desires. So it is doing its work. It’s working for something. But obviously, we realize, it’s not working for everybody. So it depends what we want. Do we want it to work for the few? Are we okay with this hierarchical way? Are we all right with these flashpoints of interest where a few of us are let in, and then this silence and reassertion of the values? Are we okay with this logic where the only real thing as a festival programmer you can do is to decide what comes in and out?
You can’t shift the conditions in which something is made or seen or translated. It’s just this sort of gate that we can open or close. If we’re okay with all of that, then yes, a film festival is useful. If we’re not okay and we want to undo those things and those logics, then I don’t think the film festival is a useful model for us at all.
Everything that the film festival stands for is about keeping people in and out. It’s not an open space. It’s not a neutral space. It’s a bordered space. It’s a space where the worst of geopolitics is played out. Like with the situation in Gaza, in Palestine, the few statements that we are seeing from film festivals are so deeply compromised in terms of the kinds of commitments that can be expressed in those spaces, despite the fact that they have extracted the ideas of decolonial filmmaking, decolonial thought for content for many, many, many years. What is that practice of solidarity that cannot happen in a film festival, it’s just really clear in this moment.
There’s this quote from Med Hondo, the Mauritanian director. He famously said, “The way that film circulates, whether I make a film in Paris or Nouakchott, it’s pretty obvious that my country will not see it.” Over the long term, the situation becomes a latent suicide. Yes, this is an opportunity to show my work, but it will never return to the place in which it was made. And what is lost in that, and this gentrifying effect, happens in so many different ways, and what are you compromising in order to be shown in this way?
Abby Sun:
Are there any examples right now of collectives or spaces or people that you think are offering an alternative with values that you would believe in, things that are perhaps open to the idea of everyone, or at least working not to create those in-out barriers?
Jemma Desai:
I actually just came back from a trip to Indonesia, a symposium hosted by SAVVY Contemporary. They’ve got a project called United Screens, which is like a long-term research and exhibition project that tries to create a platform between independent filmmakers, exhibitors and distributors, to kind of activate a new way of circulating, and it’s really about south to south connections, across Indian subcontinent, Africa and Asia. It’s a really long-term research project, but it started as a series of interviews with people in South Asia.
They’ve found really creative ways to present their ideas. So the most recent iteration, they do this symposium where they bring people together who don’t always get collected in that way. We had people from Colombia, Panama, Pakistan, Palestine, Tunisia, Egypt, Jordan, Tanzania, Sudan, Lebanon, India, Iran, Singapore, Thailand, Taiwan, Philippines, Indonesia, and then a couple of European countries. It was such a huge group of diverse experiences. And we ended up making a zine together about different ways to distribute. But what I’ve really learned there is that it’s really hard to do this work collectively, but also that it’s very easy. We just need to be together.
What I really see in that project is this commitment to a community of practice and a commitment to trying to figure out how to be together—that United Screens project. It’s long-term and ongoing. It’s not tied to an outcome. It’s really about, how do we create new practices and how do we embody them?
What we have in film festivals and circulation right now is the result of many repetitions of one way of being. And what I see in the United Screens project, really, it’s space to practice and to embody a different way to be.
Abby Sun:
So what advice would you have for filmmakers to position their work in community, if film festivals can’t be that space?
Jemma Desai:
I really want to invite us to find spaces where we can safely and expansively think about what matters to us. Consider, what do you need to do things differently? Who do you need? Just even asking that question might be an invitation for people to gather.
Avril Speaks:
Reorient to audience: I think that’s something for filmmakers to really think about and really consider, in terms of alternatives and ways to make this business more fruitful and sustainable. For film festivals, think about, how do you make more resources for filmmakers to reach their audiences? For film festivals, for organizations who are creating labs or creating grants or funding, and I think it’s so important for those people who are venturing out and who are trying different models and different systems to document it. We desperately need it.
That’s all for this episode of Distribution Advocates Presents. Tune in for our other series installments discussing the landscapes of film school, distribution, sales agents, awards, and exhibition.
This episode is produced by Moso House. Our producer is Nacey Watson Johnson. Our supervising producer is Ivana Tucker, and our production manager is Samiah Adams. Sound design is by Emily Crain. Special thanks to the team at Distribution Advocates, Abby Sun, Carlos Gutiérrez, Karin Chien, Amy Hobby and Kelly Thomas, as well as this episode’s guests, Jemma Desai, Amy Hobby, Abby Sun and Kaila Hier. And of course, a heartfelt thank you to our funders, Ford Foundation, Prospective Fund, and Color Congress. Until next time, I’m your host, Avril Speaks, signing off.