On Criticism

This week, Distribution Advocates member Abby Sun wrote about film festival reporting and reviewing in Woche der Kritik, the magazine of Berlin Critics’ Week. We’re excerpting a paragraph below and you can read the piece in full here.

As my film programming has given me entry into closed-door spaces where decisions about categorizing films are contested, I have come to see my public-facing writing as a place where I can record my sense of changes in festivals and other film institutions. Aside from a techno-authoritarian future, festivals continue to contend with the merging of streaming into broadcast and theatrical space, social movements resulting in 50/50 by 2020 pledges, efforts in nonfiction to (again) focus on decoloniality, hybrid virtual-physical festival editions, and how institutions respond to or ignore #metoo allegations against predatory festival programmers and consultants. Historically, festivals have gone through all this before—multiculturalism and the politics of difference was all the rage in the 1980s and ’90s, to give one example, but those inroads fell out of favor. If now, as then, the changes remain purely within the film programs without institutional accountability, after the crisis passes we will once again further entrench ourselves on a path where only the very few can sustain themselves.

Join us for a Clubhouse event to discuss the piece on Sunday March 14 at 10a PT / 1p ET.