Festivals of Their Own Response

This article was lengthier than I thought, so I took more notes than anticipated, but it was rather fascinating. I had no idea the first standalone film festival was way back in 1938 in Venice. What's even funnier is the fact that Leni Riefenstahl's documentary Olympia won top honors. A couple of semesters ago I was forced to do a presentation on Riefenstahl where I basically learned she was a huge Nazi endorser and allowed Hitler to control what films she made. I'm just going off on a bit of a rage at this point since I hated that class along with that presentation, but I was proud of myself for knowing some film history for a second there. Though I had never done any research into it, I always assumed the first American film festival had started somewhere such as LA or even New York City, so I was intrigued that it was actually in San Francisco in 1975. It was sad to read that these festivals first showed a lot of experimental films but started to give them less and less screen time as the years went on. As a film student I unfortunately still don't have a huge liking for experimental films as they tend to have a deeper meaning that I never catch on to. In saying that though, I do believe that they should be shown to audiences as they can be extremely creative and different. I was glad to see that in 1978 a new type of film festival emerged to showcase underground films, and eventually became the well-known Sundance in 1989. On a quick random note, I was completely unaware too that The Blair Witch Project premiered there. Once again though, the further I read, the more disappointed I became as I saw that Sundance too followed in the footsteps of other festivals by giving less and less screen time to experimental films. Luckily, I wasn't too alarmed as I knew that more and more underground film festivals such as Slamdance and Slamdunk eventually became popular venues for experimental flicks. Something that sounded epic was the "Bring Your Own Film" film festival started by Michael Williams, and I find it weird that something like that hasn't become more of a thing over the years. Some really good advice in the article too was that as a filmmaker you should take the opportunity to have your films screened anywhere and everywhere since that will allow you to have a diverse audience. Another thing that sounded epic was the travelling film festival that Antero Alli first put together in 1992 as the Nomad Video Film Festival. Since that time, the Resfest Digital film festival and Microcinema International's Independent Exposure film festivals have traveled beyond America, which is also ridiculously awesome. I literally knew nothing about the history of or broadness of film festivals before reading this article, so to see that the Substream Film Festival since 2002 has presented a single festival that runs simultaneously in multiple cities just seems insane. I can't even begin to imagine how much effort goes into all of that planning...goodness! So to start wrapping up this blog, I feel that I should go over the random facts I collected from the overview of the film festivals they listed towards the end. The Bare Bones International FF in Oklahoma has a "Bonehead Award", and Cucalorus (whoop whoop!) was founded in 1994 by Twinkle Doon. DancesWithFilms was confronted by Orion Pictures who claimed the name of the festival was too similar to the film with the name Dances With Wolves. Meanwhile Orion has gone out of business and DancesWithFilm continues to thrive, so ha! The HiMom! FF was started in Chapel Hill (go NC!), and the No Dance Film Festival was billed as the world's first DVD-projected film festival. The interview at the end of the article reinforced how every film festival is different and rejection letters should never get you down. I also think it's neat that Josh Koury started the Brooklyn Underground FF that has the feel of an underground art gallery.