FILM FESTIVAL YEARBOOK 2: FILM FESTIVALS AND IMAGINED COMMUNITIES

I am pleased to announce the publication of Film Festival Yearbook 2: Film Festivals and Imagined Communities, edited by Dina Iordanova with Ruby Cheung, published by University of St. Andrews Film Studies in conjunction with their Dynamics of World Cinema project. The book is the second in the series; the first volume, the Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit, was published in 2009. I'm pleased—not only because I was invited to contribute my essay "Diasporas by the Bay: Two Asian Film Festivals in San Francisco"—but, primarily, because my essay promotes two of my favorite film festivals in the San Francisco Bay Area: the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and the 3rd i Film Festival.

As the publishers have synopsized: Film Festivals and Imagined Communities, the second volume in the Film Festival Yearbook series, brings together essays about festivals that use international cinema to mediate the creation of transnational "imagined communities". There are texts about the cultural policies and funding models linked to these festivals, as well as analysis of programming practices linked to these often highly politicized events. The case studies discuss diaspora-linked festivals that take place in Vienna, San Francisco, San Sebastian, Havana, Bradford, Sahara, South Korea, and London and that feature cinema from places as diverse as Nepal and Kurdistan, Africa and Latin America. Authors include Lindiwe Dovey, Ruby Cheung, Michael Guillén, Jérôme Segal, Miriam Ross, Roy Stafford, Yun Mi Hwang, Isabel Santaolalla and Stefan Simanowitz, Mustafa Gündoğdu, and Dina Iordanova. The Resources section features an up-to-date bibliography on film festival scholarship (by Skadi Loist and Marijke de Valck) and an extensive thematically-organized listing of a variety of transnational festivals. Dina Iordanova has offered the volume's contents at her own site DinaView.

Jonathan Rosenbaum has written: "The very ambitious aspiration of the Film Festival Yearbook is, quite literally, to define a new area of film study. Part of the implied agenda of the book, given the scope and seriousness of the aspiration, is to combine some of the best and most valuable features of scholarly rigor with some of the most valuable features of journalism. The book can be useful to potential and actual film festival programmers as well as to academics who are studying film festivals as a social phenomenon. Filmgoers with particular interests of their own as well as those who are invested in specific national or ethnic groups will also be attracted to this volume."

Faye Ginsburg, Director of the Center for Media, Culture and History at New York University has written: "Film Festivals and Imagined Communities—the second volume in the series—opens up new horizons both for those who study media and those who create the significant but often overlooked "media worlds" where films first get launched: film festivals from the "periphery". Anyone who has attended or helped run one knows the intensity and significance of these distinctive social arenas in calling attention to new work as well as to emergent cultural possibilities. This excellent collection clarifies the role that film festivals play as venues that constitute a social universe for diverse groups, audiences, and artists (diasporic, indigenous, LGBT, migrant workers). With articles addressing how these festivals work—from the economic and artistic considerations of those who produce them to the way they help to 'imagine communities'—we start to understand the role these festivals play for members of minority communities that too rarely see cinematic work related to their lives. This collection is indispensable for anyone interested in understanding contemporary global media and what makes it work."

Finally, of related interest, is a recently-published article by Konrad Ng (University of Hawaii, Mānoa)—"Thoughts from Oslo, Norway: Film Festivals and Expanding the Moral Imagination"—published at FlowTV. In his article Ng aligns certain lines of reasoning from President Obama's acceptance speech for the Nobel Peace Prize with cinema, especially with regard to "the continued expansion of our moral imagination; an insistence that there's something irreducible that we all share." Following this line of reasoning, Ng proposes that film festivals can serve as a "model of engagement that may help expand our moral imagination." Citing Michael Shapiro's Cinematic Geopolitics, Ng suggests that "film festivals can be a space for envisioning possibility and articulating critical attitudes towards acts of violence and oppression; film festivals can 'provide a venue for films with significant anti-violence and anti-war themes and cinematic styles' and by doing so, assist the expansion of the moral imagination." By way of case study, Ng takes a look at how grassroots Asian American film festivals such as the Los Angeles Pacific Film Festival (sponsored by Visual Communications), and the International Asian American Film Festivals in both New York (sponsored by Asian CineVision) and San Francisco (sponsored by CAAM) contribute "a critical role in translating and transforming a notion of community into cultural and political engagement."

CAAM's Executive Director Stephen Gong acknowledges Ng's thesis as "provocative and convincing" and states: "There are many kinds of film festival, [of] course. Some of the largest are integral to the marketing and distribution of cinema as entertainment. Some at the other end are more geared toward civic boosterism. Our sector, and one shared by dozens, if not hundreds of other culturally specific festivals, reflect, as Konrad asserts, an important connection to a cultural or identity-community, and as such, play a key role in the continued evolution of the community and its place within the larger world."

06/02/10 UPDATE: I'm so pleased that the Film Festival Yearbooks are receiving some coverage in film journals. Adam Nayman's review for the current issue of Cineaste surveys both volumes, along with On Film Festivals—the third edition of the Dekalog series guest edited by Cineaste staffer Richard Porton. Nayman has been especially kind to me. He writes: "This plurality of voices extends also to FFY2, which gestures towards the margins of the international film festival network, focusing on festivals geared towards different ethnicities and social groups. It's heartening, for instance, to see a piece written by somebody best known as a blogger—Twitch.com critic Michael Guillén, whose 'Diasporas By the Bay' patiently explicates the ways in which two San Francisco-based initiatives—the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival and the San Francisco South Asian International Film Festival—have thrived by matching "content to constituency." Thanks for the shout out, Adam!

Cross-published on Twitch.

FILM FESTIVAL YEARBOOK 1—A Response to Section Two

With the 47th edition of the New York Film Festival currently in progress, I thought now would be a good time to follow-up on my response to Section One of Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit, edited by Dina Iordanova with Ragan Rhyne, published by the Center for Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews and Wallflower Press; namely because Section Two of the Yearbook provides six festival case studies, including Rahul Hamid's informative and fascinating historical essay "From Urban Bohemia to Euro Glamour: The Establishment and Early Years of the New York Film Festival" (2009:67-81).

As stated in Iordanova and Rhyne's introduction, Hamid's contribution to the Yearbook plumbs the depths of NYFF's archives to narrate the establishment of the festival through a description of the institutionalization and organizational politics of NYFF's first edition. I was particularly captivated by this strategy because—in essence—by laying out the conflicts, issues and compromises that characterized the first years of the NYFF, it addresses "the curatorial challenges still faced by the festival today and can offer insight into the epicurean world of contemporary film festival culture." (2009:67)

"Epicurean" is a lovely and apt term to emphasize the role of curatorial taste in shaping any festival's given program and how conflicts in taste texture festival experience. What has become perhaps the most important value of my appreciation of Hamid's case study of the NYFF is how it has provided an ameliorative perspective on some of my ongoing complaints about the San Francisco International Film Festival, which I now understand are neither specific to SFIFF nor "original" in any sense of the word. Said complaints have longstanding historical precedent and reflect the ongoing challenges compromised by curatorial choice. That choice can (and perhaps should) always be questioned by audiences and press; though that's not to say the challenges become resolved even if the choices are commuted. More and more I've come to understand the staged irresolution of these conflicts through the film festival platform. No one is to blame. It is the nature of the beast; film festivals the cage within which the beast paces.

Hamid situates his discussion by deferring to the seminal work of Thomas Elsaesser, who "describes the post-war film festival circuit as a direct response to the growing power and hegemony of Hollywood and the US film industry. This antagonistic relationship to Hollywood colored much of the international discourse around festivals, situating festivals and the European art cinema they programmed as anti-commercial 'high art' and American cinema and theatrical distribution as the province of the masses and lowbrow commercialization (though famously, Jean-Luc Godard and François Truffaut challenged this distinction)." (2009:67-68) As the awkward fate of commercial distribution of films presides over the future of so-called festival "art film" and alternative exhibition practices, this current concern appears to have been built into the film festival phenomenon from its onset.

Amos Vogel—along with his wife Marcia—created Cinema 16, which had a direct influence upon how the NYFF was initially programmed. His 1975 book Film as Subversive Art was (as Hamid describes it): "Part manifesto, part celebration, and part detailed cinematic catalogue, there is no better introduction to Vogel's curatorial philosophy, which prioritized the examination of form over content, allowing industrial film, experimental work and auteur cinema to be appreciated on an equal plane." (2009:70). Vogel and his compatriot Richard Roud—then director of the London Film Festival—were instrumental in the establishment of the NYFF.

The NYFF helped to elevate the stature of cinema on parity with more established art forms, such as theater and literature, largely due to the advocacy of Andrew Sarris at The Village Voice and Eugene Archer at The New York Times; both of who did not see film as subordinate to the established art forms, in contrast to older critics (like Stanley Kauffmann at The New Republic) who did (2009:75).

Kauffmann emerges as a problematic figure in discussing the formative years of the NYFF, especially for his 1965 essay "Are We Doomed to Festivals?" in the October 2 issue of The New Republic. As detailed by Hamid: "In 1965, Kauffmann viciously attacked the [NYFF], homophobically complaining that Roud's descriptions of the films were written with a 'limp mind and wrist'. He called Special Events a 'circus sideshow', maintaining that festivals were for selling films and not for the display of art. Good films will be released, so ran the logic, and the rest were not worthy of the exalted status given to them by the festival in the first place. Kauffmann argues that the festival films should be shown in small venues year-round like Vogel's Cinema 16 (Kauffmann 1965:30-32)." (2009:77) I'm not familiar enough with Kauffmann's work to know if he has since retracted his initial impressions, though Bart Cardullo—in his important Bright Lights Film Journal interview with Kauffmann—bravely circumambulates around Kauffmann's opinions shaped by nearly 50 years of film criticism.

Kauffmann was, by no means, singular in his criticism. Several older critics and the business establishment itself complained throughout 1964 and 1965. This criticism was compounded by that of younger critics who took objection to the establishment of the "hold review" policy (which has since become de rigeur for festival press coverage). "According to Sarris, the rule that films could not be reviewed during the festival (because this was too far in advance of their theatrical releases and therefore not useful for film promotion) grew to become a major cause of anger among critics, who were not primarily interested in the films' profitability." (2009:77).

Again, to be made aware that this longstanding conflict with the hold review policy has been in place since the onset of the NYFF serves to mollify my disgruntlement with the hold review policy at SFIFF. I now more fully understand the compromise struck between commercial and art cinema within the parameters of the film festival proper as a tension that is hardwired into the festival experience. That concession being made, however, I am still critical of the questionable policy of the tiering of press at film festivals, where celebrity "red carpet" journalists are granted more privilege and access than journalists who—like myself—elect to focus on first-time directors from the Global South or auteurial cinema. If reliance on studio fare provides essential financial backing and a spectacular dimension to film festivals—which I can appreciate—it should not, however, occlude the role of film journalists in advancing the work of non-studio fare. I plead for more parity in this instance.

Finally, "The NYFF also pushed the culture of film festivals one step further by being, in a sense, a festival of festival movies. The films selected were for the most part self-consciously artistic, created for an educated, international audience. On the other hand, the NYFF was non-competitive and stayed away from the hyperbolic atmosphere that surrounds festivals like Cannes and Venice. It was created as a haven for art appreciation. A staid and reverent atmosphere remains at the festival even today, as it approaches its fiftieth year. Further insulated from a promotion-crazed commercial atmosphere by the proliferation of festivals on this continent (Toronto in particular), the NYFF seldom hosts any North American premieres any more. Contemporary critics might also view the event as elitist and think of the festival as a completely bourgeois and irrelevant institution, but ironically that was part of the original point of the festival—to give film a place in the cultural establishment of the city." (2009:79-80)

In summation, Hamid's historicization of the NYFF serves as a template to understand the organizational precedents of international film festivals in general, drawing into focus the perhaps necessary contention between art and commercial cinema and the role of film festivals and their audiences in negotiating that tension.

The remaining case studies in Section Two of the Yearbook include Charles-Clemens Rüling's organizational analysis of the Annecy International Animation Festival as a "field-configuring event"; Kay Armatage's hands-on recollection of the 1973 Toronto Women & Film International, which examines—as the editors state in their introduction—"the ephemeral history of women's film festivals through her own memory" (2009:3-4); David Slocum's look at two African film festivals: FESPACO and the Zanzibar International Film Festival; and, finally—of related interest to the NYFF's current Masterworks series "(Re)Inventing China: A New Cinema for a New Society, 1949–1966", expertly graphed out by Kevin Lee at The Auteurs Notebook—Ruby Cheung's narration of how the Hong Kong International Film Festival transitioned from a government-run program to a model influenced by corporate efficiency and sponsors, and Ma Ran's examination of how "that policy and aesthetics collided as underground Chinese cinema found its way onto the international film festival circuit, much to the chagrin of Mainland Chinese bureaucrats" (2009:4).

All of these essays are fascinating, informative reading that broaden an appreciation of the film festival experience in its contemporary unfolding. I would also recommend Richard Porton's erudite Moving Image essay "The Festival Whirl", wherein he references the Yearbook in his consideration of "the utopian possibilities—and dystopian realities—of the modern film festival."

Cross-published on Twitch.

DIASPORA BY THE BAY: 3rd i—The Evening Class Interview With Artistic Director Ivan Jagirdar and Administrative Director Anuj Vaidya

The San Francisco International South Asian International Film Festival (3rd i for short) is held each year in early November. As Vanessa Hua explained at the San Francisco Chronicle: "The name is a riff on the third eye, a symbol of internal reflection and perception, and Third World cinema, or movies from developing countries." This year's edition—continuing with their expansion into a four-day format—will venue at both The Castro Theatre and the Roxie Film Center. As a non-profit, national organization, 3rd i was founded by Ivan Jaigirdar, Shilpa Mankikar, and Camille Ramani in 2002 to represent filmmakers and audiences from Bangladesh, Bhutan, India, Nepal, The Maldives, Pakistan, Sri Lanka, Tibet, and the South Asian Diaspora. An early interview with Ramani and Jaigirdar for The Indian Express explored the early efforts of the organization, which has continued to support their mission by providing film screenings, filmmaking courses, networking resources, and a distribution channel for the South Asian-American film community and their audiences.

I met with Artistic Director Ivan Jagirdar and Administrative Director Anuj Vaidya at ATA for this research interview for Diaspora By the Bay. Along with being Co-Founder and Executive Director of 3rd i South Asian Films, Ivan Jaigirdar is the Artistic director of San Francisco International South Asian Film Festival and the Bollyhood Cafe. Prior to founding 3rd i, Jaigirdar served as Creative Director and Programmer at Artist Television Access (he is still on the board), and has helped curate programs for numerous festivals including San Francisco International, Asian American Film Festival, Madcat International Women's Film Festival, the Black Film Festival, and NoisePop. Also an accomplished filmmaker, Jaigirdar's work has screened in festivals all over the world.

My thanks to Karen Larsen at Larsen Associates for setting up the meeting.

* * *

Michael Guillén: Ivan, how many years has 3rd i been in operation?

Ivan Jagirdar: Prior to becoming a festival we were a monthly screening house. We started about 2000-2001. For two years we did monthly screenings and gradually grew rapidly. In 2003 we decided to become a festival.

Guillén: Was there a focus to the monthly screenings?

Jagirdar: There wasn't anything specific except that we wanted to get diverse images of South Asia; films about South Asia of South Asians by South Asians. They weren't commercial. They were underground alternative films. We started off with humor because we knew that attracted people so we showed depictions from British South Asian filmmakers, like Goodness Gracious Me and things like that. Then we went on to queer South Asian representation and then experimental South Asian representation. We try to get a variety of images.

Guillén: What prompted that? Did you not feel that the San Francisco International Asian American Film Festival was satisfying the needs of the South Asian community in the Bay Area?

Jagirdar: I was on the screening committee for the Asian American Festival, which was then NAATA, now it's CAAM, and really enjoyed that environment; but, yeah, we needed a South Asian festival. It was also at a time when there was a critical mass of South Asians that had appeared in England and I was a part of that. I grew up in England. We were getting a lot of the literature coming over from India and Bangladesh. There was some kind of shift going on in England where there was a cross-pollination going on between literature, music and film. Coming here, we didn't see that shift.

So part of what started the monthly screenings was to bring over that sense of that new identity in South Asia and the South Asian diaspora within San Francisco. We found it was so successful. We had chapters in New York, Chicago, L.A. and Washington, D.C. We spread quickly.

Guillén: 3rd i is operating in all these locations?

Jagirdar: We were. Two years in we realized that was just too much work. We decided to switch to the festival model and focus on San Francisco. It wasn't that CAAM wasn't enough. Our mission initiative was that there were other aspects of South Asian representation we wanted to explore, so—along with this critical mass occurring in England and what we saw happening here—we wanted to take advantage of it.

Anuj Vaidya: Also, the idea of Asian or South Asian, they're constructions, right? And so I think in a way when Asian was considered or when that identity came to be, it was imagined as East Asian. That was what the community was at that time. It's only been in the last 10 years or so that this South Asian community has become a more visible presence.

Guillén: Do you have a sense of San Francisco's South Asian community?

Vaidya: More and more. Especially in the last two-three years, we're seeing a lot more younger South Asians.

Jagirdar: It's no longer that first generation. It's second and third generation South Asians. What's interesting is that—when we were here initially—you'd see South Asians but you'd know everyone on the street. Now I don't know anyone and I see so many younger South Asians. It's like they're no longer living in Fremont. They're in San Francisco.

Vaidya: I think it's the largest growing minority population in the city of San Francisco.

Guillén: But Fremont was the original nexus?

Vaidya: Silicon Valley. Fremont. Yeah, South Bay. [According to the 2000 census, there are some 167,000 people of South Asian descent live in the Bay Area, many who came to work in the tech industry.]

Guillén: Just to confirm, you've structured yourself on the nonprofit model and you receive funding from the San Francisco Arts Commission?

Jagirdar: That's a wonderful part of the city. It does support so many festivals and supports diversity within the community.

Guillén: Ivan, when you were talking about the critical mass occurring in England and the cross-pollination of the arts and film, can you give me some specific examples of how that occurrence was being represented in film?

Jagirdar: I think we're used to seeing the traditional stereotypical Apu Trilogy based in India. I'm not critical of them; but, that's the kind of image that people have of India and of South Asia as a whole. In Britain there was more—at least from the diasporic perspective—a contemporary perspective that we were not just from India or Bangladesh or Pakistan or Sri Lanka; we're also from England. We're also from Australia and the U.S. So when I'm talking about the critical mass, I'm talking about the perspectives of South Asians in that context of England and using both the language of cinema in India as well as from Britain. Again, it was the cross-pollination of the two producing something new, a different expression. We'd see it in short films. Eventually, we got Bend It Like Beckham and, of course, now Slumdog Millionaire rooted, arguably, in British Asian roots. But there was also music and writers like Salman Rushdie so it was not just in film. There was The Buddha of Suburbia, a television miniseries made from the book. It was all of that and all of that working together,

Guillén: You're reminding me that—in her book Impossible Desires: Queer Diasporas and South Asian Public Cultures—Gayatri Gopinath offers a fantastic analysis of Surviving Sabu, which fits within these perspectives.

Jagirdar: I love that film! It's one of my favorites. It's a critical look at early representations of South Asians in Hollywood: Sabu in Jungle Book. It shows Sabu as who he was, what he was, his real life and his constructed life in cinema and how he suicided at the end. Surviving Sabu is the narrative of a British Queer South Asian based in England telling that Hollywood story. It's very well-done.

Guillén: So I've heard. Please do a revival screening.

Jagirdar: It was in one of our early compilations that we showed years ago, within the initiative I was talking about of bringing over that different identity of South Asian.

Guillén: Talk to me about how you monitor and acquire diasporic content for your festival. Do you see films at other festivals? Are you part of a network?

Jagirdar: We learned as we progressed. For us, there wasn't a network; I didn't see a network. Gradually, step by step, using the Internet a lot, finding out other people we knew in festivals in England, things like that, we learned more each month as we gradually got deeper in the roots of distribution of films abroad, in England and other countries. Also, we worked with CAAM—then NAATA—a lot. I eventually put together the 3rd i International Shorts; but, I started seeing films like Surviving Sabu through being on their screening committee and realizing there was something there to put together, which eventually ended up as the compilation.

Vaidya: Now there are so many South Asian film festivals and a lot of Indian film festivals. Some places think that's interchangeable, which is problematic. We track that a lot now and see South Asian film festivals in other countries. There's one in Florence, Italy. One in France. Those places often showcase local talent and so you get to see what kind of South Asian content is coming out of different countries through tracking these different festivals. In the last five years there's been this proliferation of South Asian film festivals. In the U.S., we were the first; but, across the world I'm not sure.

Guillén: With there being a proliferation of South Asian film festivals, has that meant that collaboration has been co-opted by competition? Or are you collaborating more with these other festivals? Is there the equivalent of a 3rd i Film Festival in Los Angeles that you can share programming with?

Vaidya: There's the Indian Film Festival of L.A., but they only show Indian content and not South Asian. Only about half of our films are from India and the rest are from other South Asian countries.

Jagirdar: Collaboration is one of the things we are exploring now more and more. We have started to speak with the people involved with the Indian Film Festival in L.A. and the Indo-American Arts Council in New York. Since we're not in the same region, there's no area of competition and collaboration is possible. There are competitive film festivals that you can see in different regions; but, what's wonderful about San Francisco is that it's so collaborative, such as our work with CAAM. We've worked with CAAM since we've started.

Vaidya: There's so much South Asian content now. Last year we felt our festival—which we were running for three days—had to go to four days because we just couldn't decide what to not show. This year, we programmed four days and there's still films left over that we wish we could go to five days. There's a burst of activity from South Asian filmmakers. There's definitely some kind of resurgence going on.

Also, in 1991-1992, India started satellite television. Until then, there were only two channels you could get on Indian television. All of a sudden in 1991 Indians had 50 channels to choose from and they were seeing a lot more media from across the world coming into India. We're seeing the effect of that in this gestation period that's then resulted in all these new ideas giving birth to new media.

Jagirdar: To add to which, India always had the biggest film industry in the world, bigger than Hollywood, so it stands to reason that there's already tons of films coming out of there in every way, from art movies to more commercial movies. The industry's expanded. I heard a comment once where Americans are raised on the three Rs—reading, 'riting and 'rithmetic—whereas, Indians and South Asians are raised on the three Cs—cricket, curry and cinema.

Guillén: That's why Lagaan hit so well when it did; it had all three. I would argue Lagaan was the turning point in America's exposure to and acceptance of Bollywood film.

Just to be clear—because I suddenly realize we're operating off of certain presumptions here—when we're talking about South Asian representation in cinema, which countries are you talking about?

Vaidya: It varies. I don't think there's a definite answer. I mean, we're definitely talking India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Tibet, Bhutan, Maldives. There are all these countries on the edges that have had longstanding cultural continuity with South Asia but aren't necessarily considered South Asia.

Guillén: Would Malaysia be in that group?

Vaidya: No, that's Southeast Asia.

Guillén: Oh my gosh, is there a Southeast Asian Festival?!

Vaidya: No, there's not.

Jagirdar: But CAAM covers a lot of Southeast Asia.

Vaidya: They cover Vietnam and Thailand and the Philippines, that entire region.

Jagirdar: That's one of the differences we have with CAAM; we're more South Asia. They're all of Asia but we focus specifically on South Asia.

Guillén: In terms of South Asian diasporic representation, are there any South Asian American filmmakers that you're starting to profile?

Jagirdar: I would say that's the biggest change we've noticed. When we were first starting 3rd i, we would go after British films because they were so much more interesting and had depth into the social content and commentary of all sorts. The few South Asian American films that came out were, by contrast, superficial to tell you the truth, made by people who had made money during the dot.com boom and had millions to spare and said, "Let's make a film."

Vaidya: It's changed a lot in the last two or three years. There are a lot of younger filmmakers who have gone to film school or art school and are coming out and making films. But in the beginning, like 10 years ago, it was just a lot of people who had made a lot of money and decided to quit everything and go make films because that was what they dreamed about.

Guillén: Are you saying that—without much more incentive than that—their films were formulaic Hollywood rip-offs?

Vaidya: It was a lot of identity politics and cultural tensions but in a simplistic way. They weren't nuanced. They were like TV after school specials working out their own cultural conflicts. Though one film that came out early—and it speaks to this—by a filmmaker named Nagesh Kukonoor was called Hyderabad Blues (1998) and is about a guy who goes back to India after working in the Silicon Valley. It depicts the tensions of his going back to India after having lived here for a while and it's a brilliant film, low-budget. So Kukonoor is an example of a person who quit his Silicon Valley job to make films and he's one filmmaker who has actually continued to make films to this day. I think he's moved back to India for good.

Jagirdar: If we're using Surviving Sabu as an example of what we think is a layered film with social content and interesting well-done cinematography, acting, everything, then yeah, I think it's taken a long time for South Asian American filmmakers to get there; but, it's happening.

Guillén: Has the diasporic experience—as rendered through South Asian filmmakers in England and the U.S.—deepened South Asian film?


Jagirdar: I don't know if it's deepened it. There's just a different conversation going on.

Vaidya: Right. I feel that it's less about fresh-off-the-boat issues. When you first come into a culture, there's the shock and dealing with that; but, in a way, it has deepened the filmmaking because it's more about conversations with the culture you're in, as opposed to being in conflict with it all the time.

Jagirdar: One of the aspects of being in Britain was that there was a genuine conflict, there was a lot of racism going on, and there was a reaction to that. Whereas I find in South Asian Americans, the issues weren't about racism as much as about the process of exotifying South Asians in America. It was a different form of racism, perhaps kinder and gentler, but it definitely switched post-9/11. Especially in the Sikh community, racism was felt heavily in terms of standing out with turbans. A lot of films got made out of that post-9/11 environment of South Asians and specifically of the Punjabi community.

Guillén: I imagine it became more pressing to be accurately represented?

Jagirdar: Right.

Guillén: By pooling resources and collaborating with other West Coast South Asian and Indian film festivals, do you feel you could accomplish more towards the spectacular dimension of a film festival? Attracting more talent, let's say?

Jagirdar: Your question is right on track. That's exactly what we're aiming at.

Vaidya: We've only had local guests, because that's easy, but otherwise we've had very few guests at our festival.

Jagirdar: Our focus was never the spectacular to begin with. We just wanted to bring the films. Plus we didn't have the budget for it. Now that we've developed the budget, we recognize the need to bring that spectacular dimension into the festival to create more attention but also to widen the festival.

Guillén: But in all fairness, sometimes the film is spectacular enough. For example, your screening this last year of Om Shanti Om in the Castro Theatre was one of the most thrilling in-cinema experiences I've ever had. I've never seen an audience react like that. During that final musical sequence when all of Bollywood's best and brightest make an entrance, the audience screamed each time a new star appeared. I mean, I didn't even know who these people were and I was screaming, I was so excited!

Jagirdar: [Laughs.] That's the wonderful part about 3rd i. We go for underground alternative films but we also go for one great Bollywood film a year and we take our time to pick it. An audience at the Castro Theatre when it's packed is 1,500 and they laugh where they're supposed to laugh and then they laugh when they're not even supposed to laugh. It's a party in a sense and it's something we all celebrate.

Guillén: You usually sell out the Castro on Bollywood night during 3rd i. How is your outreach accomplished? Once you've lined up your films with diasporic content, how then do you find the audience to fit them? Again, do you have a community outreach network you utilize? Do you work through consulates? How do you spread the word?

Vaidya: Press obviously helps a lot. Until last year, we didn't have a publicist. Ivan basically did all the publicity, sending out press releases. Last year was the first year we worked with Karen Larsen.

Guillén: What do you think of Karen Larsen?

Vaidya: She's hooked in. That's a good thing but it has its down side because she's everybody's publicist and we're competing for her services. But she's really great. Last year we got so many little things that we didn't even know about. Working with her has opened up a lot of doors for us.

Jagirdar: Working with Larsen Associates took us to another level. Her network is amazing and she's always been so supportive of 3rd i.

Vaidya: But Larsen Associates is only one of our community outreach resources. We work with about 40 different social service organizations, cultural organizations, other film festivals, community-based organizations. We look at a film and make a list of its different content areas, who might be interested in coming to the film, and we try to find organizations that might fit that profile and ask them to co-present, which means they will send notice out on their mailing list and announce it on their website. It takes a lot of work.

Guillén: My understanding that—when the budget allows—community outreach is a job title for a specific person.

Vaidya: I used to be community outreach for Pacific Film Archive's curatorial programs for a year and a half.

Jagirdar: We also try to get films for specific communities so that we represent as many communities as we can. For example, we'll try to get a Sri Lankan film each year if we can even though it's always hard to get one. Either that, or we'll try to get a Bengali film or a South Indian film. We really work on that. So then when we get the film, we'll ask the community to support the film as well. One of the approaches we had at the beginning when we first started was to have the monthly screenings so that we built up our name recognition and got people interested in us throughout the year. That's what we're bringing back—and Anuj is really working that at the moment—in terms of our monthly screenings becoming as vital and a part of our publicity towards the film festival.

Vaidya: Our mailing list has about 8,000 names on it, which is big. But in the last few years we haven't done as many monthly screenings so the vitality of that mailing list has lost a little bit. Even though we have 8,000 names, a lot of those people have probably moved away from the Bay Area or things like that. So what we're trying to do is make our mailing list a lot more current by having year round programming that can then feed into the festival.

Guillén: Speaking of your reliance on press to spread the word, can we speak about your festival's interaction with journalists? Do you tier press?

Jagirdar: We don't, no.

Guillén: Since you're just beginning to shape a spectacular dimension to your festival, you aren't yet concerned about red carpet privileges?

Jagirdar: No. But that's actually an interesting topic about how film festivals as a whole support that hierarchical perspective. That's specifically something we've stayed away from. We try to keep our festival as egalitarian as we can, which is precisely why we've shied away from the spectacular. We're trying to mediate those two.

Vaidya: The guests that we invite to our festival aren't superstars. They're emerging filmmakers who no one's heard of. So our invited guests are not so much about adding a spectacular dimension to the festival as having audiences engage with filmmakers. That's a very important part of a film festival: learning how a film is made and the artistic process, engaging with that.

Guillén: Your focus is more educational?

Jagirdar: The filmmakers have given us feedback. Last year, all the filmmakers were saying—and maybe they're just saying it to us or everybody else that they meet—but they were saying that ours was their favorite film festival to attend because our focus is on the filmmakers. We bring them over and give them special attention, whereas at other festivals it's all about the parties and who are the richest people at the parties.

Guillén: We won't name names. [Laughs.] Though I remain interested in what the potential value is in tiering press, I haven't heard a satisfactory answer yet.

Jagirdar: There is a culture of hierarchy in film festivals as a whole, not only with press and with who gets what pass.

Vaidya: A large part of it stems from sponsorship, right? Tiering might be a replication of something that works for those goals but doesn't necessarily work towards press goals. There's a need to give sponsors something that makes them feel special, so you have a VIP reception for them or something.

Jagirdar: We're a small festival in any case. We don't even cater to that.

Vaidya: In some ways we don't want to grow any bigger than we already are because we can manage it at this grass roots level. Growing any bigger would mean we'd have to sell our souls to a certain extent.

Guillén: In other words, you're telling me you are committed to being a community-based film festival?

Jagirdar: Right. We don't want to go into the hierarchical realm right now.

Guillén: Would participating in such a hierarchy draw away from what you're trying to accomplish in exhibiting diasporic content and address?

Jagirdar: That's actually been a complaint of people who want us to go for the spectacular, especially recently. We could go in that direction—we would get a lot of funding—but, it would come with a lot of compromise. I'm glad you bring up the topic of press tiering because I'm interested in that myself. It speaks to a class system.

Guillén: Do you work with any of the consulates to advance your festival?

Jagirdar: Yeah, we work with the Indian Consulate, the German Consulate, and the French Consulate, to name a few.

Guillén: What do they provide for you?

Jagirdar: Outreach. Sometimes they help in other ways but outreach is the main thing.

Vaidya: The Indian Consulate helps us by being a conduit into the Ministry of External Affairs in India, or the National Film Archive. If we need a print from there, we get it through the consulate who brings it over through diplomatic bags, in terms of shipping. The German Consulate has done that for us as well in the past. We get help in many different ways. It varies.

Guillén: Do you think audiences are becoming more literate about film and, thus, want more from their in-cinema experience? Has this necessitated the value added component of film festivals?

Jagirdar: Literate about popular films in certain ways—let's say by TV analysis….

Guillén: And yet they've been receptive to your bringing in local filmmakers to have a dialogue with the audience.

Jagirdar: Oh, you mean our audience?

Guillén: Yes, yes, yes.

Jagirdar: Not to differentiate, but I thought you meant North American audiences as a whole….

Guillén: No, North Americans as a whole are stupid. [Laughs.]

Jagirdar: The fact is we've been bringing in—not only local—but national and international filmmakers; but, we've started a discussion series. We also have classes like "Bollywood 101" and "Queer Eye for 3rd i." We had an "Experimental i" where we compared eastern and western perspectives on experimental cinema from India. Our classes are not seen as a way to educate as much as they are a way for all of us to learn about these cinemas together. We bring in academics and filmmakers to discuss their particular part of cinema.

Vaidya: For example, our silent film program—Snakes, Sirens and Vamps—is part of that. Anupama Kapse will be giving a lecture that leads you through the history with film clips. That's the format we like to use: a speaker who illustrates their talk with clips from these films.

Jagirdar: We also just had 3rd i's Green Eye on environmental film. That was a wonderful event. We showed a film about urban farms in people's back gardens and we had a screening of Dirt before that was even released. We had Raj Patel, author of Stuffed and Starved. He was fantastic. He was so funny.

Vaidya: He was a stand-up comic intellectual.

Jagirdar: Everyone was laughing and learning at the same time. It was the best thing because if you open up, you pick up. 3rd i Green Eye was a whole day event and packed all the way through.

Guillén: Speaking of added value to the festival experience, how about open air screenings? Is that anything you folks hope to do?

Vaidya: Yeah. Ivan told me Sita Sings the Blues was playing in the park and that might be the way to do it: to partner with the City. To free two birds with one stone by getting our name out and having a fun event.

Jagirdar: Your suggestion is right on target. We've been thinking about it but haven't taken the initiative.

Guillén: Can we talk a little bit about your upcoming 3rd i film festival in the fall? Anuj told me earlier that you pretty much have it locked down except for the revival screening? Will the festival once again be venued at the Castro Theatre?

Vaidya: Two days at the Roxie. Two days at the Castro.

Guillén: And you were saying the festival has expanded to four days?

Vaidya: Last year we went to four days. Two days at the Brava and two days at the Castro. That's what we'd like to do in the future. We'd like to do the Castro and the Brava.

Jagirdar: Just to add to that, we like to support the independent theaters in San Francisco and that's part of it. It's important to steer people towards those independent theaters like the Roxie, the Brava, and the Castro. That's where we like to screen our festival.

Guillén: Returning to the theme of collaboration with Bay Area film festivals, who are you working with?

Jagirdar: We love working with CAAM. In some ways we came out of CAAM, you know. We meet regularly to discuss ways to work with each other.

Vaidya: We've been talking to them about possibly joining in on distribution initiatives.

Guillén: Since some of the countries that border South Asia are technically Mideastern, have you collaborated at all with, let's say, the Arab Film Festival?

Jagirdar: We haven't explored that much. What's interesting is that the 3rd i in New York—because there's still a 3rd i New York and it's a pretty big film festival—they work with the Arab Film Festival and have created the joint South Asian Arab Film Festival. Here, we've discussed it. Actually, one of my closest friends was the director of the Arab Film Festival a couple of years ago. They're much bigger than us in some ways and they go over several days; but, we have done co-presentations with them.

Guillén: How about distributors? Do you work with them at all to create buzz for your festival?

Jagirdar: We haven't really, though we have a little bit. Slumdog Millionaire was one of those collaborations. That was a good way to begin the spectacular. We've done others with co-presentations, like Bend It Like Beckham with CAAM. The year before we did Loins of Punjab, which for us was spectacular.

Guillén: So when you worked with the distributor for Slumdog Millionaire—and we need to at least mention Slumdog Millionaire because it proved to be such a benchmark film this year—did they send any talent? Did they provide a cost reduction in the print rental? Anything like that?

Jagirdar: No, they were just very generous and someone did come. It was good to work with them actually.

Guillén: [A long pause and then laughter.] I know you guys are keeping something from me. [Prolonged laughter.]

Vaidya: The collaboration that we're thinking of in terms of fundraising and things like that has less to do with other film festivals and more to do with other community-based organizations. Expanding the purview of who we collaborate with.

Jagirdar: We've collaborated with the Jewish Film Festival, maybe twice, and hopefully in the future.

Vaidya: Last year at their film festival, we co-presented In Search of the Bene Israel, which was about the Jewish community in India. Our collaborations have been mainly co-presentations.

Guillén: So 3rd i—by scheduling a Bollywood night and a revival screening—is providing a temporal spectrum to your programming?

Vaidya: Yes. Our opening night is usually a focus on a local filmmaker. We're trying to shape our closing night to be more of a big event.

Jagirdar: Our decision to focus on local talent for the opening night of our festival is unusual. We've been having local filmmakers for the last couple of years but now we're adding some performance within that.

Vaidya: It's going to be neo-Benshi this year.

Guillén: Ivan, talk to me about Bollyhood Café, which I understand you run.

Jagirdar: Bollyhood Café was an extension of 3rd i in some indirect way. It was a physical space to do more South Asian-related art, theater, film, dance and partying. I hadn't seen a community space for South Asians in San Francisco like other communities had community spaces. That's what it was meant for, though that's not what it became. Now it's just more of a club space. I'm less involved with it now.

Guillén: Finally, returning to your festival relationship with press, I wanted to shout out to one of your major champions, journalist Frako Loden. Each year she offers to write up 3rd i for The Evening Class / Twitch and I'm always like, "Okay, if you have to." [Laughs.]

Vaidya: She is one of our champions. We love Frako.

Jagirdar: I was on the screening committee at CAAM with Frako for something like eight years and—each time something would come out of Frako's mouth—I'd make a note.

Of related interest:

Film International Special Issue on Film Festivals (Vol. 6, Issue 4)

Film Festival Yearbook 1—A Response to Section One

Diaspora By the Bay: SFJFF—The Evening Class Interview With Program Director Nancy K. Fishman and Program Coordinator Joshua Moore

Cross-published on Twitch.

FILM FESTIVAL YEARBOOK 1—A Response to Section One

Hello. My name is Michael and I am a film festival junkie, which means I cycle through addiction (should I watch four movies today or five?), recovery (I'm feeling oppressed with movies and I'm going to stop watching so many of them) and recidivism (the Toronto International's coming up!). Thus, you can imagine my unbridled delight in Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit, edited by Dina Iordanova with Ragan Rhyne, published by the Center for Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews and Wallflower Press.

As synopsized: "The first installment in an annual series, the Film Festival Yearbook features essays on the global proliferation of film festivals, focusing on the dynamics of the festival circuit. Contributions discuss the function of individual festivals within a larger and more complex network and the cultural policies that shape channels of film exhibition and distribution. The inaugural volume will include essays by Dina Iordanova, Charles-Clemens Rüling, Ragan Rhyne, Ruby Cheung, and Rahul Hamid. Forthcoming volumes cover gay and lesbian film festivals; festivals of Asia and the Asian diaspora; and the relationship between festivals and geopolitics."

Dina Iordanova is professor of film studies at the University of St. Andrews, where she directs the project Dynamics of World Cinema. She is the author of Cinema of the Balkans and Cinema of the Other Europe: The Industry and the Artistry of East Central European Film, both published by Wallflower Press. She guest-edited a recent Festivals issue for Film International, where I first became acquainted with her work and which I reviewed for The Evening Class. Highly-recommended reading.

As is Film Festival Yearbook 1: The Festival Circuit, which impressed me straight off for its staged parity between academics and critics-practitioners. Walking their talk even further, I was honored—as a non-academic and more practitioner than critic—to be invited to contribute to the next volume. Reviewing the worth of this first volume is almost impossible, if not implied—its necessity and timeliness are givens—so, instead, what I've decided to do is to respond to the essays themselves in a series of four entries that correspond to the sections of the book to set an (idiosyncratic?) example of how I've rendered the information relevant to my own festival experience(s).

As editors Iordanova and Rhyne lay out in their introduction to the volume: "By launching the series of the Film Festival Yearbook with this inaugural volume, we aim to: 1) explore festivals in a systematic manner that, while relying on individual case studies, will foreground theoretical concerns at the intersection of arts management, cultural policy and film studies and 2) chart the complex structure of the international film festival network, bringing along a better understanding of World Cinema. A level of abstraction is needed for the study of festivals to gain momentum and translate the currently scattered research environment of festival studies into a sufficiently structured context. Our hope is that the Film Festival Yearbook will serve this function.

"In a programmatic essay, Thomas Elsaesser described the festival network as a specifically European industry response to Hollywood's distribution mechanisms and explored festivals in the context of actor-network theory. With respect to Europe, Elsaesser claimed, the festival circuit had become the key force and power grid in the film business, with wide-reaching consequences for the respective functioning of other elements of film culture, such as authorship, production, exhibition, cultural prestige and recognition." (2009:2) That "programmatic" essay—"Film Festival Networks: The New Topographies of Cinema in Europe"—was published in Elsaesser's European Cinema: Face to Face With Hollywood (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2005). Although film festival scholarship had been ongoing for some time, Elsaesser's essay provided a fulcrum through which existing scholarship could be incorporated into the burgeoning field of film festival studies as well as a gameplan on how to proceed systematically. As important as his essay is to the field of film festival studies, I'm heartened that it has been made available in PDF format. Again, highly recommended reading.

"It is only through the continued development of both strands of festival studies—case studies and the theorization of their broader relevance to our understanding of the festival as a circuit—that this research will continue to progress," Iordanova and Rhyne argue in their introduction. "Just as the study of museums and galleries has become crucial to our understanding of the institutionalization of arts and heritage, so too must the study of festivals be central to understanding the socio-cultural dynamics of global cinema and international cultural exchanges at large." (2009:1)

As mentioned earlier, the volume has been divided into four sections. The first section on the film festival circuit begins with an analysis by Ragan Rhyne—"Film Festival Circuits and Stakeholders"—wherein she "deploys some of the case studies in this volume, arguing that the various interests of festival stakeholders are negotiated through the administrative and economic structures of a newly-globalized non-profit sector." (2009:3) Ragan Rhyne is a Research Associate at the Center for Film Studies at the University of St. Andrews on the Dynamics of World Cinema project. Her work has been published in GLQ, Velvet Light Trap, and the Journal of Homosexuality. It is perhaps of contextual import to note that the Dynamics of World Cinema project is a major research project undertaken by the Center for Film Studies at the University of St Andrews and sponsored by The Leverhulme Trust. This two-and-a-half-year-long study hopes to examine the patterns and cycles of various distinctly active circuits of contemporary film distribution and exhibition, and the dynamic patterns of complex interaction between them. Their attention will focus predominantly in four areas of the global circulation of non-Hollywood cinema: the international penetration of international blockbusters mainstream distribution, the film festival circuit, the film circulation via diasporic channels, as well as the various Internet-enabled forms of dissemination. The project's distinctiveness is in the endeavor to correlate these diverse strands and foreground their dynamic interactions.

Rhyne's essay poses the provocative consideration that the film festival "circuit" might be a misnomer. "The trouble," she writes, "is that materially, the film festival circuit is not nearly as connected as we have thought. In fact, we might abandon the structural idea of the festival circuit as a single entity altogether and instead understand it as an international cultural sector linked by a common economy of public and private subsidy." (2009:9) This economic understanding of the festival as a cultural industry managed through a global non-profit sector necessarily places a spotlight on who the stakeholders are in any given film festival. By "stakeholders", Rhyne references "filmmakers and studios, journalists and press agents, professionals and programmers, local cultural councils and supranational agencies, tourist boards, cinephiles, and others", all of whom she proposes "have particular interests in seeing the network proliferate." (2009:9) As both journalist and cinephile, I'm primed to question my own staked interests.

Rhyne's historical purview of the role the non-profit mechanism has had in enabling film festivals to function—being funded by "some combination of earned income, government funding, corporate sponsorship and private donations" (2009:10)—likewise raises thorny issues about the hazardous reliance on such means of economic backing. Most recently, at the 29th edition of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, Executive Director Peter Stein and the festival's programming staff came under severe fire from conservative constituencies protesting the inclusion of Simone Bitton's Rachel, a documentary about Rachel Corrie and her controversial death. Conservative private donor Maurice Kanbar—who felt Rachel had no business being in the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival line-up—was overheard proclaiming that the Jewish Film Festival would not receive one more penny from him. The Koret Foundation and Taube Foundation likewise pulled their funding, protesting injuries to the Israeli state. They were deeply offended that the SFJFF invited Rachel Corrie's mother to the festival, and that the program was co-presented by the American Friends Service Committee and Jewish Voices For Peace; organizations which they claim are "virulently anti-Israel, anti-Semitic groups that support boycotts, divestment, and sanctions against Israel." At Tikun Olam, Richard Silverstein staged debate on the issue. Statements by both The Koret Foundation and the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival have been posted at JWeekly.com, where coverage on this "controversy" has continued.

I, in no way, want to deminimize the economic impact that withdrawal of funding from Kanbar and the Koret/Taube Foundations might have on the operations of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival, albeit momentarily, and I consider this an unfortunate blow; however, this is a classic example of funders trying to manipulate a festival's programming, and thereby cultural policy. Perhaps Kanbar and the Koret/Taube Foundations should concert their conservative efforts to financing their own Zionist Film Festival—spelling it out clearly for all concerned—and leave the mission objectives of the San Francisco Jewish Film Festival alone?

In a less vitriolic but no less important example, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art recently jettisoned their 40-year-old film program. Doug Cummings has provided a masterful synopsis of the controversy at his site Film Journey; a controversy that, once again, underscores how withdrawn funding can strangle film culture. Critic Kenneth Turan lays out the hazards competently for the L.A. Times.

Both examples confirm Rhyne's hypothesis: "From the outset, geopolitics and cultural politics have been co-articulated in the institutional structures and commercial affiliations of international film festivals." (2009:11) Rhyne cites Daniel Dayan's essay "Looking For Sundance: The Social Construction Of A Film Festival" (published in Moving Images, Culture and the Mind) wherein Dayan remarked that the film festival—referencing Sundance specifically—is often "an agonistic site of negotiation" dependent "upon a variety of conflicting interests" and "structured to not only contain them but also to deploy them toward institutional goals through what he calls the collective performance of the festival—a performance that actually requires the negotiation of these conflicting interests. Ironically, these conflicts, he argues, are fundamental to the cohesion of the festival as an event.

"…Dayan argues that the festival is constituted not only through the negotiation of these conflicts but also through journalistic chronicles of it—what he calls the 'written festival'. 'Like the physical event, but even more acutely so, the written festival turned out to be made of different versions, relaying different voices, relying on different sources of legitimacy. But it also provided its own common threads.' (Dayan 2000:52).

"Through his concept of 'the written festival', Dayan suggests that film festivals—or at least Sundance in particular—are constituted not only through the negotiation of various stakeholders, but through the articulation of these conflicting positions in journalistic coverage of the festival. This negotiation, in other words, is not incidental to the festival institution itself, but crucial to both its function as an event and to the way that the festival is understood as a cultural phenomenon. We might understand this as suggesting that the constant public discussion of the battle of festivals for aesthetic autonomy from the varying pressures of Hollywood, audiences, critics and corporate sponsors is theoretically misleading. The festival cannot solve these conflicts. Rather, it has an interest in playing them out in the cultural public sphere." (2009:18-19). San Francisco and Los Angeles have certainly had the opportunity to do so in recent weeks.

It's perhaps important to remember that the festival as a cultural industry managed through a global non-profit sector was an evolved response to the administration of the world's first film festival in Venice, founded by none other than Benito Mussolini and conceived as a tribute to fascism in Italy and Germany.

Moving on to Dina Iordanova's entry "The Film Festival Circuit", she "challenges the standard line in festival studies that film festivals constitute an alternative system of distribution. Instead, her suggestion that it is better understood as an exhibition network sheds light on how the economy of the festival circuit actually functions." (2009:3)

Cautioning that the art of cinema has been taken over by seemingly "secondary concerns like the rank of celebrities on the red carpet and the numbers of accredited journalists" (2009:23-24)—take heed San Francisco International!—Iordanova concludes: "The global film festival phenomenon is not inherently networked. Most festivals come about as singular ventures, independently from each other as temporary entities and discrete exhibition sites. They mushroom autonomously from each other, copying each other's model and replicating it in their own locality. It is only after a festival is established locally that the issue of its relationship with other festivals in what constitutes a loose network comes about. In that, individual festivals are discrete phenomena that spring up independently rather than as part of an orchestrated move." (2009:26).

The notion of film festivals as an alternate distribution model surfaced for me during my days on the board of the Global Film Initiative and was articulated by Jonathan Marlow in his fiercely opined Greencine editorial "They didn't build their sales model for you" (which remains a good read all these months later).

Film festivals as an alternative exhibition network, however, raises questions about the fees extracted by filmmakers and distributors from festivals to offset costs which will most likely never be achieved by a theatrical distribution (rendered incidental). Transparency on this subject is woefully inadequate. Any input encouraged.

Finally, Janet Harbord's essay—"Film Festivals-Time-Event"—"takes a somewhat different approach to her conception of the festival circuit, calling for renewed attention to the temporality of the festival circuit, rather than a strict focus on festival geographies." (2009:3) Harbord is Reader of Film and Screen Media at Goldsmiths, University of London. She is the author of Film Cultures (Sage, 2002), The Evolution of Film (Polity, 2007) and Chris Marker: La Jettee (Afterall/MIT Press, 2009).

Harbord's essay thoroughly fascinated me, as much on a philosophic level as on a cinephilic one. "While attempting to think of a film festival, its meaning is inseparable from its particular location. And if it is not possible to make sense of a film festival without its emplacement, it is increasingly difficult to imagine certain cities apart from their film festivals." (2009:40). Hello, San Francisco! In my recent research project on the community-based festivals in the Bay Area, it's already becoming apparent how crucial the multiculturalism and ethnic diversity of San Francisco and environs plays out in its ongoing festival culture. In some respects when it comes to personal experience, some cities are their film festivals. Though I have been to Toronto several years in a row, I know nothing about the city itself except the infrastructure of TIFF. The same for the Palm Springs International. I do not extend myself past the festival experience to familiarize myself with what else the city might have to offer. But those are the admitted failings of an affirmed film festival junkie.

The spatial qualities of film festivals not only have to do with urban settings but the venues within those cities. For example, I have a vigilant eye on negotiations to move the San Francisco International out to the Presidio and away from the more-convenient Sundance Kabuki theaters. I hope to determine why this is considered a necessary choice; what—if any—connection it has to civic subsidies for development of tourism; and if this choice can escape a critique of classism, especially from a population committed to public transit? Has the San Francisco Film Society thought out a solution to access? Transit to the Presidio is highly problematic, let alone that the site itself is insular, with few amenities for the public. Will SFFS consider shuttles from convenient transit nodes (much like the Palm Springs International) or are they catering to an upper echelon of membership who can drive their fancy cars to the festival; lower minions be damned? I propose that one of the most winning aspects of the Toronto International Film Festival is how its public transit system efficiently connects its various venues, insuring egalitarian attendance.

As for time? Her essay could have just as aptly been entitled: "Does anybody really know what time it is?" Harbord defines a film as a recorded document of something past, which is then exhibited in the present. She argues that festivals gather together "the time of film and the time of viewing and recenters the time of projection as a live event. This choreography of a dance between the live event on one hand and the recorded, pre-fixed film on the other is the manufactured time of the festival. The alchemy resulting from these different temporalities, the now and the then, characterizes the potency of the film festival as event." (2009:44)

Further considerations of time involve when a festival is scheduled within a yearlong calendar. One of the specific challenges encountered by the San Francisco International, let's say, hinges on its being perhaps the very last festival of the calendar year, coming into play as Cannes announces its line-up of what is presumed to be the next year's bumper crop of films. Then there is the somewhat addictive intensity of film festivals produced by the compression of time anywhere within a few days to a few weeks. Then there's each person's selection of films, the choices made to best manage time spent at a festival; choices that include film length, film stock, conflicted screenings, and how much time one has to get from one venue to another, or to nourish the body with food, social networking or unapologetic down time.

If truth be told, my film writing was conceived by diary entries; my journalism from journal entries. Anaïs Nin encouraged me to consider that attending a film was a valid moment of life experience. She faithfully recorded cinematic events in Paris in her diaries, which inspired me to endeavor the same. This habit of writing in my diary about films I've seen has reached its seeming apotheosis in The Evening Class, which has become my running account of the sociality of Bay Area film culture. Harbord reflects on same: "A critical factor in the manufacture of live time is the role of reporting, the witness statements of journalists and bloggers sent out to the wider public to describe the event that has already happened. If the gate-keeping functions of film festivals are most evident in spatial terms, the barriers and ropes that demarcate internal worlds, the temporal also has a function in this practice of demarcating the event from everyday life, from the outside. Written reportage, which is the main form of festival journalism, is a delayed experience, a postcard as it were emitted from the place of happening. The newspaper report helps to seal the time of the event as a live happening that can only be recounted afterwards to those outside of its boundary.

"The task of the film festival is to make time matter," Harbord asserts, "to give urgency to the viewing of film in an historical context in which the public release of film is no longer a necessary compelling event of itself. The condensed structure of the festival makes the here and the now of viewing critically important. Contingency, which marks the festival as an unfolding event whose details are unknowable in advance, affords a singularity to the experience: to see a film here and now will be unlike any other time of viewing. This moment of viewing will attach itself to the film in many cases, bringing a film notoriety or award that then becomes part of its circulation, a moment 'carried over'." (2009:43-44).

These are fascinating concerns that ramify into considerations of what the difference is between the advance previewing of films on screener in contrast to the in-cinema reviewing of films in a festival, modes of distribution and exhibition, and how both anticipation and fulfillment are temporally and spatially structured.

Cross-published on Twitch.