(Jihlava’s Silver Eye award winner, DISCO & ATOMIC WAR. Pay attention to this film…revelatory, funny and seamlessly cinematic historical filmmaking)
Here we go again. I departed Jihlava this afternoon, which followed four days in Leipzig. It was an intense two festival week. Now a day of recovery in Prague (literally, I’m sick, yuck) then Sheffield, Copenhagen and, finally, a grand finale in Amsterdam. Five documentary film festivals in five weeks. I did this trip last year. I even remember parts of it.
Is there anything comparable to the phenomenon which is the contemporary film festival circuit? Obviously there are cultural festivals, conferences and trade fairs of every kind, but film fests are their truly own breed of cat. Filmmakers, producers, programmers, funders, critics, journalists, papparazzi, buyers, sellers, wannabes, sponsors, partiers, politicians, publicists, radicals, academics, the public. So many interests and agendas in play, sometimes beautifully intersecting, but also often colliding. And like hundreds (thousands?) of times a year, given the glut of international film festivals.
While this particular trip brings all of the fest circuit’s unique qualities to the fore, being in the trenches makes achieving perspective elusive. What am I doing here, exactly?
As an aid to my existential quandry, recently I’ve been reading some of the new “festival studies” treatises that have been published. That the work I do is now the object an emerging field of study with complicated concepts, acronyms, and words I thought I knew, but don’t, not to mention very long bibliographies, is somehow heartening. What’s more, I’m relearning my job. For instance, Marijke de Valck’s fascinating Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics To Global Cinephilia is at once a historical, theoretical and highly practical overview of the international film festival circuit.
De Valk uses four case studies (Berlin, Cannes, Venice and Rotterdam) to explore all the workings of film festivals, and how they function within film culture. While densely theoretical and jargony in places (it was written as a doctoral thesis), its full of insights sure to spark anybody working in the everyday of the film festival world. For example:
“It is my understanding that the survival of the phenomenon of film festivals and its development into a global and widespread festival circuit has been dependent on the creation of film festivals as a zone, a liminal state, where the cinematic products can bask in the attention they receive for their aesthetic achievements, cultural specificity, or social relevance….Film festivals, in short, are sites of passage that function as the gateways to cultural legitimization.”
Maybe that explains why I just left an obscure town in the middle of the Czech Republic. As Doc Air’s Nina Numankadic, also part of the Jihlava fest team, explained to me, if their festival was in Prague they’d lose everybody to the city. In Jihlava its very easy to pay attention to the thing we’re there for, documentary film. This past week I screened over twenty-five new docs, had many meetings in two different cities, and more than enough cocktail and dinner chat, pitches, panels and parties.
I’m in the bubble, and for the most part will be until closing night, Hot Docs 2010. For those of us that do this professionally, attending a film festival is a state of suspension. Festival attendees exist in their own time free zone, connections with the outside world becoming tenuous. The continuous partial attention that defines our daily lives gives way to singular pursuits, driven by myriad agendas at any one event. Attention is a precious commodity, and film festivals trade in spotlighting where we should direct it.
Last night in Jihlava a jury I was on gave an award to the terrific Estonian documentary DISCO & ATOMIC WAR. While we were recognizing excellence, what we were really doing was offering a cue: this is something to which you should give your attention. This is what programmers do when they select a work, what critics do when they write a review (and even the negative reviews give attention), distributors when they buy, etc…
We go to film festivals, audiences and industry alike, to pay attention. To see, listen, and learn away from the fray, but within another of a different sort.