What The World Needs Now (is Your Film Festival)
by Meredith Finch, Founder & Director of Nevertheless Film Festival
In early 2018, I decided to take my handful of years of film festival experience and try starting one of my own. I spent the rest of the year excitedly planning, setting up a website, registering the LLC, assembling a team, and getting a logo designed, and soon the Nevertheless Film Festival was starting to feel real. In the fall, I met with a seasoned festival founder to get some advice. After some small talk and giving her thanks for meeting with me, she looked at me and said, “You know, the world doesn’t need more film festivals.”
The meeting didn’t last much longer.
While I certainly asked myself, why would someone say that?, perhaps the bigger question is, why would someone think that?
Sure, it’s true that film festivals are nowhere to be found on Maslow’s hierarchy of needs. Neither are coffee shops, and there are fifteen within half a mile of me. But new film festivals, much like coffee shops, are created every year, whether you think the world needs them or not.
More film festivals means more opportunities for audiences to see work they’d otherwise never have a chance to see! The disappearance of film festivals would be a terrible thing for filmgoers and filmmakers alike.
Countless films are made every year, from ten-second shorts to four-hour epics. Film festivals are important because they allow people to enjoy those films in a theater with an audience, versus alone on a computer or — heaven forbid — phone screen. They present audiences with opportunities to interact directly with filmmakers during Q&As, parties, and panels.
And lest we forget, festivals allow audiences a chance to see films selected by experts and tastemakers of varying degrees. Seeing a film at a film festival can be a risk, a cinematic adventure, and an opportunity to experience something that’s been determined by a team of programmers to be worth your time. Whether you find that time spent to have been worthwhile is up to you, but doesn’t the experience of seeing something head-scratching make for a better story than streaming Love, Actually for the umpteenth time?
On the surface, one could easily equate Sundance and Tribeca (or SFFILM and SXSW, or Hot Docs and DOC NYC) as similar festivals. But while “film festival” as an umbrella term implies one specific thing (one or more days of film screenings), nothing else is necessarily the same between different festivals. And that’s ultimately what film festivals are all about — providing unique experiences for audiences.
All sorts of factors contribute to the experience one will have at any given festival. Among them: geographic location, non-film programming, and years in operation. At Sundance, the festival and its attendees take over the mountain town of Park City. The festival provides free buses to get between venues, sponsor activations take over Main Street, volunteers providing information can be found on nearly every corner, and you’re probably going to run into a celebrity.
Tribeca Film Festival, on the other hand, takes place in New York, a city of 9 million people, where approximately 9 million other things are going on during the week of the festival. Attendees can catch a screening, then head back to their Brooklyn apartment and chat with their roommate who didn’t even know the festival existed, let alone was happening that week. The audience experience at each festival couldn’t be any more different.
But Doesn’t This City Already Have a Film Festival?
A few months before the inaugural Nevertheless Film Festival, someone asked me, “Doesn’t Ann Arbor already have a lot of film festivals?” This, unlike the “world doesn’t need more” comment, seemed like an honest question, but there also existed an underlying implication of, “Is there an audience for yet another film festival in this town?” The answer is always yes, there is.
When someone implies that your town has an overabundance of film festivals, they’re imagining that people think like this: “I’d love to check out that new film festival, but I already went to one this year! What’s the point?” But the audience at the Ann Arbor Film Festival is different from the audience at the Ann Arbor Polish Film Festival is different from the audience at Nevertheless Film Festival. Because festival attendees are often first and foremost independent film lovers, there is usually some audience overlap at different festivals in a given region — but festivals with defined themes or niches have the added benefit of tapping into their own specialized audiences of people who may not normally frequent the cinema. At Nevertheless Film Festival, which programs films made by women in leadership roles behind the camera, we make a point to seek out local women’s organizations and people involved with equal rights initiatives, much like the Ann Arbor Polish Film Festival likely interacts greatly with local Polish-American or Polish history groups.
Even if your festival’s theme is as broad as “great independent film,” what programmers of your festival qualify as “great” won’t be the exact same as the programmers of the other festival in your town. Your version of a film festival is uniquely your own, no matter what some industry veteran or passerby tells you. So get out there and show us your festival!
Meredith Finch is the founder and festival director of Nevertheless Film Festival, which elevates the work of women in various leadership roles behind the camera. She’s worked in film production on documentaries including The Diplomat (2015), The Eagle Huntress (2016), and It’s A Hard Truth, Ain’t It (2018), but her true passion lies in film festival operations. Meredith has worked in various capacities for festivals including Sundance, Tribeca, San Francisco International, and DOC NYC.
