Saturday, April 16, 2005
How To Do a Film Festival
So I was looking at the schedule for the upcoming San Francisco International Film Festival, and I was completely overwhelmed. Tons of films, lots of which could be good, and few of which I'll actually have time to attend. Does anyone have a strategy for picking out films to see in a situation like this? If so, I'd love to hear about it. For now, I used this GreenCine Daily post as a sort of filter. Perhaps the interface on the film festival web site is not ideal; I remember the web site for the Seattle International Film Festival being better last year.
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I don't really trust advance buzz on festival films. In the past, I've greatly enjoyed films that nobody advocated, and felt nothing about films that had good advance buzz or even won best-of-festival awards.
For SIFF, I usually get the printed-paper catalog (which has capsule summaries) and circle films that sound interesting. I also try to prioritize films that appear less likely to get picked up by US distributors, because if they get picked up I'll get another chance to see them. Non-action Asian films, for example, are more likely to get picked up than European films; and animation is less likely to get picked up than live-action.
Then I look at the schedule and pick times to see some subset of those films. In the past couple of years I've ended up with about a dozen films over the three weeks of SIFF. It's hard to see more than that without effectively going on vacation.
Ultimately, however, festivals are always a gamble. If you take risks, and you see a lot of films, chances are you'll see a couple of really bad ones. That's part of the price you pay.
Good luck. Wish I could visit SF. Alas, my spring break was last month.
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