From: Tom Whiteside (email suppressed)
Date: Wed Feb 16 2011 - 10:24:17 PST
I will speak about one festival, Full Frame Documentary Film Festival (Durham NC, April 14-17 this year). While it is not an experimental festival, most of the issues discussed here are pretty much the same. Full Frame has shown experimental work in the past, and we leave the definition of “documentary” up to the filmmaker – you self-select as “documentary” if you submit work to Full Frame.
Full Frame gets approximately 1300 submissions each year from around the world, shorts and features, and roughly 60 to 80 of those will be accepted for the festival, something like 5%. (The festival is larger than that, as there are curated sections, etc. We look forward to seeing you before long, Rick Prelinger!) Selection committee is 20 people, all dedicated and qualified (film librarians, film makers, film scholars, arts administrators, musicians, writers, a wide variety of cultural workers, young and old). We start looking at films in October and finish early February, each member of the selection committee gets a bag of films each week, watch everything on your own time, take notes. We hold six meetings (five hours each) where each and every film is discussed – some of the discussions are short. No one person sees every single film submitted, but each title is seen by several people. The committee finishes by giving a list of our selections to the programming staff. They make all final decisions as to what will be screened at the festival.
As a member of this volunteer committee (we are well compensated in festival passes), I know that every year there are some films that I really love that don’t make it out of committee. I think other people on the committee feel the same way – about different films. But collectively we take the job very seriously, and that is how you “get through 1000-2000 films.” It takes 20 people four months to go through the process, no slackers allowed. And oh yes, you have to have a professional staff setting all of this in motion. They know how to run the business, raise the money, secure the venues, take in the submissions and distribute them to committee, organize the selection process, make worldwide travel arrangements for filmmakers, promote the festival, run the show, etc.
Is it worth it? You bet it is!
- Tom Whiteside
I agree with Dominic, I have heard horror stories about festivals sending home 150 tapes each to 5 individual undergrads telling them to choose 20 that “he/she likes” no mention of the criteria of evaluation or the fact that a single person’s judgment might throw off the whole process. I mean realistically how else are you going to get through 1000-2000 films right?
Deco
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