How We Achieve Diversity
…and thoughts on where we go from here
SF Urban Film Fest seeks to invite new perspectives and voices to the urban planning conversation that’s shaping the lives of all Bay Area residents. As such, diversity is core to what we do, and each season we challenge ourselves to bring more diversity to the festival. At our events, we distribute audience surveys that include a few demographic questions (yes — we’re urban nerds). This article is our initial analysis of the survey data, our working theories of how we achieve diversity, and a few questions that guide us for future inquiry.
We’re pretty excited about the data from our 2018 season, because it looks like our diversity efforts are on the right track. As shown in the graphs below, our audience very closely resembled the Bay Area ethnically. These graphs also show where we have room for improvement — for example, increasing our engagement with the LatinX community. And they’ve led us to ask: is diversity reflecting the status quo enough?
SFUFF audiences are diverse racially and also in age: 46% of our audience are millenials, and the remaining half is spread fairly evenly across generations. According to our analysis, our audience comes from all over the Bay Area, with 33% of Bay Area zip codes represented, and is concentrated in San Francisco (70%) and the East Bay (18%). We also attract a wide array of professions.
Our Strategies
Because there are so many factors at play here, we can’t point to a direct correlation between our diversity efforts and the audience turnout. However, the data does seem to indicate that there’s something special about SFUFF that attracts an audience that’s diverse on many levels.
We started to speculate on which practices contribute to building a diverse audience, and we think it comes down to 3 main things:
1. Representation
We believe attracting a diverse audience starts with representation: having diversity behind the scenes and on stage, among our organizers, panelists, and filmmakers.
We’re aware that as organizers, we bring our own perspectives (and, of course, biases) to the work that we do, and it can have a big impact on who the festival reaches. So we’ve focused on building a diverse team of organizers and volunteers. We’re 50% female; our founder, Fay Darmawi, is an immigrant and person of color; among our producers, Susannah Smith, Omeed Manocheri, and Robin Abad, we represent the LGBTQ community and a variety of ethnic backgrounds. We dig deep in our personal networks and try to leverage those to generate diversity in our audience turnout.
We also make sure that we have a diverse panel of speakers at our events — over 50% people of color and 40% women in 2018. We know that these speakers, who are always part of our outreach strategy, will be the public face of the event and will attract their own networks of friends and followers, creating a kind of ripple effect of diversity. This effect is amplified because according to our surveys, word of mouth is still the primary way that people find out about SFUFF.
In the 2018 festival, over 50% of the films were directed by women, and 48% by people of color. As we review our film submissions, we’re looking not only for diverse filmmakers but for diversity on screen, e.g. in the actors and subject matter that’s presented. We just spent a good portion of one of our meetings carefully choosing a few additional film screeners from our network — guided not by who was the most experienced (or the biggest supporter), but by which perspectives were underrepresented in our selection process.
2. Framing events
Diversity in our representation leads to a diverse raw material of issues, films, and participants. We’ve been learning to strategically frame this material in the way that will generate the audience and outcomes that we want to see.
In 2017, we oriented some of our events on identity, including one on the political role of queer space and another on the legacy of James Baldwin’s seminal visit to San Francisco to examine issues affecting African Americans. The turnout was great, but while it was satisfying to create space and programs that spoke to a specific community, we realized that what we also wanted was an intersectional group at each event, bringing diverse viewpoints to a broad discussion of urban issues.
So for our 2018 season, we set out to create an inclusive overarching theme, “The City that Holds Us.” We broadcast our goal to “imagine the city as generous instead of extractive…as reciprocal,” and to explore “public policies and urban planning practices prioritizing human connection…shifting the paradigm to nurture the city and ourselves.” Using this framework as our guide, we curated events that encouraged different communities to connect. “The Stories We Will Tell,” for example, brought together members of the tech and art world, together with the City Hope House sober living home, a performance about LatinX history, and a piece about an LGBTQ landmark — with the shared goal of exploring technology’s impact on storytelling.
In shifting away from a more identity-based framework, towards a more community-based framework, we found that we attracted a more diverse audience overall. And the important cross-sectional conversations that we’d sought to generate — sometimes confrontational, always constructive — were happening in our panel discussions and our audience Q&As.
3. Venue selection
Framing and representation come together in our venue selection. We select venues all over the city to bring in as many different communities as possible. Venues have their own marketing networks and presence in their neighborhoods; the Roxie Theater in the Mission is naturally going to attract a different crowd than SPUR downtown. Furthermore, we actively seek out programming collaboration with our venue partners. From our event on Street Art at SFMOMA to our event featuring youth filmmakers and activists at Youth Art Exchange’s [x]space in the Mission, working closely with venues has led to speakers and content we wouldn’t get through other channels.
We find that our focus on place-based programming is rather unique among film festivals, and we think it’s had the intended side-effect of connecting with diverse audiences. Place-based programming comes out of our core mission to make urban planning relevant and accessible to more people; with our team’s background in urban design and architecture, we think critically about space, understanding that where our events are held will become inextricably linked to what they’re about and who they reach. We’re taking this concept to new heights this summer with a “Sidewalk Cinema” event that will physically bring our programming to the streets.
Where do we go from here?
Diversity is such an intrinsic value for us that we don’t think we’ll ever feel like our work is done. Our stats from last year have given us some concrete goals for the next season: we definitely need to improve our outreach to the LatinX community, and while we love our friends in urban planning, we want to do a better job of attracting audiences from different professions, especially more filmmakers and artists.
Bigger picture, we’re questioning if reflecting the status quo of diversity in the Bay Area is enough. Rather than purely diversity, we want to work towards equity in urban planning and festival participation. How do we make the pie bigger for those underrepresented in the Bay Area and elsewhere? How can we improve our methodologies to let us track more diversity metrics and get data faster, so we can respond to trends during our season? How do we break down economic barriers to our festival — not only through discounted and free events but also by going beyond our “word of mouth” network and our reliance on social media and technology?
As we continue to expand our festival and shape our leadership for years to come, we will continue to ask questions and challenge ourselves to invite new perspectives to the table. Only then can we learn about the questions we haven’t thought to ask.
This article was co-authored by Fay Darmawi and Paige Dunn-Rankin. Thanks to Reanna Tong for the analysis of our survey data, and to our SFUFF volunteers for their help with data collection and entry, without which this article would not have been possible.
