Just ask Movieline Chief Critic Stephanie Zacharek, who is already stationed in Venice for the season's first major film festival: Fall is the happening time for these organized movie galas. In honor of this fest upswing -- and Movieline's week-long seasonal cinema celebration -- we contacted authorities at the Telluride, Toronto, New York, London and AFI film festivals to pick their brains about the programming process, their events' unique identities in the fest circuit and much more. For festival novices, consider this a primer for the autumn film festivals. And for the seasoned vets out there, enjoy these behind-the-scenes accounts of the rigorous preparation that goes into selecting tomorrow's award-winning films.
Telluride Film Festival (Sept. 2 - 5)
Title: Co-Director
How many years have you been with the festival?
Five
How many films are in this year's festival?
Approximately 50 including special programs; core program is 24
Approximately how much time is spent planning your program each year?
360 days
What are you looking forward to most this year?
Seeing our audience enjoy the films -- best payoff ever.
How would you define your festival's identity, and how does it fit into the festival circuit?
Intimate, pure, no business show business
We have stayed true to our original mission. There are more festivals, economy has seen a few disappear but we hope to keep doing what we do as well as we can for as long as we can.
Has awards season's ascendancy impacted the fall festival climate for better or worse?
We try to pay it no attention.
Place us in a selection committee meeting. What are the conversations? What are the disagreements? How are they resolved?
Top secret -- we don't always agree!
What do you most look forward to at each year's festival? What do you least look forward to at each year's festival?
Getting underway; special favor requests!
What's your favorite festival memory?
Colin Firth and Claudia Cardinale reconnecting -- they had worked together on a film in South America on which Colin met his wife -- cool moment to observe.
What's your advice for aspiring festival programmers?
Be adventurous, balanced and brave.
Toronto International Film Festival (Sept. 8 - 18)
Title: Documentary Programmer
How many years have you been with the festival?
Six years at TIFF.
How many films are in this year's festival? How many films were submitted?
336 films at TIFF (268 are features) out of 3,461 submissions.
Approximately how much time is spent planning your program each year?
I have my eyes open year-round, but the most intense period is May-July.
What are you looking forward to most this year?.
It's always exciting to debut work from veteran filmmakers such as Werner Herzog (Into the Abyss), Fred Wiseman (Crazy Horse) and Jessica Yu (Last Call at the Oasis). But in some ways it's even more gratifying to showcase work by lesser known filmmakers such as Girl Model (directed by David Redmon & Ashley Sabin) or Undefeated (directed by Dan Lindsay & T.J. Martin).
How would you define your festival's identity, and how does it fit into the festival circuit?
TIFF is many festivals in one. You can focus on a specialty like star-driven work in Galas, documentaries in Real to Reel, emerging filmmakers in Discovery, high adrenaline in Midnight Madness or experimental in Wavelengths, and more. But I think it's most fun to sample a little of everything to get a take a wide survey of cinematic trends.
Has awards season's ascendancy impacted the fall festival climate for better or worse?
TIFF has long been seen as a key launching pad for awards season with successes such as Slumdog Millionaire, The Hurt Locker and King's Speech. Increasingly, the festival has also played a similar role for documentaries such as last year's Inside Job that had its North American premiere at TIFF.
Place us in a selection committee meeting. What are the conversations? What are the disagreements? How are they resolved?
At TIFF, programmers are given autonomy, so very little selection happens by committee. If I love a film that everyone else hates, I can still program it. Yet we often share work with each other to get second opinions.
What do you most look forward to at each year's festival? What do you least look forward to at each year's festival?
Most: the excitement that comes with filmmakers unveiling their years of hard work before audiences for the first time. Least: the anxiety that comes with that.
What's your favorite festival memory?
I'll subvert the question and focus on the memories I hope to be making this year with U2 taking the stage for From the Sky Down -- the first time a doc has been Opening Night of TIFF; or President Mohamed Nasheed of the Maldives appearing for the world premiere of The Island President; or first time filmmakers Dan Lindsay & T.J. Martin presenting Undefeated.
What's your advice for aspiring festival programmers?
Establish your voice - whether it's through journalism, blogging or Twitter. Stake out your area of expertise. Learn how to build an audience. If you can get several hundred people to buy tickets based on your recommendation, you're a programmer.
New York Film Festival (Sept. 30 - Oct. 16)
Title: Associate Director of Programming
How many years have you been with the festival?
Five as a member of the selection committee. Two as Associate Program Director for the Film Society.
How many films are in this year's festival? How many films were submitted?
There are 27 films in the Main Slate, which screen in our 1,100-seat Alice Tully Hall venue, plus more than 60 additional films and special events scheduled for the Walter Reade Theater and Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center, including our Masterworks series (which features retrospectives, restorations and rediscoveries of classic cinema), a robust documentary sidebar, panel discussions, book signings and more. This year, we received more than 1,000 submissions (including shorts) to the festival.
Approximately how much time is spent planning your program each year?
As soon as one New York Film Festival comes to an end, we begin working in earnest on the next edition, which will be especially true this year as we head towards our 50th anniversary year. But the most concentrated programming period occurs between Cannes in May and the NYFF lineup announcement in August, when we convene the entire NYFF selection committee for an intense regimen of consideration screenings.
What are you looking forward to most this year?
Taking full advantage of our three new screening spaces in the Elinor Bunin Munroe Film Center to offer audiences the most ambitious and eclectic New York Film Festival in the festival's 49-year history.
How would you define your festival's identity, and how does it fit into the festival circuit?
As one of the oldest film festivals in North America, NYFF, in its early years, coincided with the explosion of the Nouvelle Vague in France and other "new waves" throughout Europe and Asia, as well as the arrival of "auteurism" as a (divisive) concept in American film criticism, drawing increased attention to directors as--for better or worse--the primary authors of their films.
How has festival programming changed since you started? (In terms of politics, number of fests, volume of films, etc.)
As a (relative) newcomer to festival programming, I can't claim to have witnessed seismic changes in the festival programming landscape, though there's no denying that the number of films being made, and the number of festivals vying to screen them, grows ever larger. I'm fond of quoting something the great Iranian director Abbas Kiarostami said to me in a 2001 interview, just around the time he himself had begun to embrace digital filmmaking technology: that only in the digital era will we know who all of the greatest filmmakers in the world are, because the availability of inexpensive cameras and editing equipment makes it possible for anyone to make a film now, the way anyone can write a novel or paint a picture. Kiarostami himself was far too diplomatic to add that we may also now discover who all of the worst filmmakers in the world are, though that's certainly true too. All of this makes the work of programmers more challenging, but also that much more rewarding when you find a cinematic diamond in the rough, or help to introduce a bold new talent to a wider audience.
Has awards season's ascendancy impacted the fall festival climate for better or worse?
As I blogged about earlier this year, the ever-lengthening "awards season" has definitely placed a greater spotlight on festivals like Palm Springs and Santa Barbara, which, by virtue of where they fall in the calendar, have evolved from quality regional festivals into high-profile whistle stops on the Oscar campaign trail -- something that works out nicely for those festivals, and for the filmmakers and performers they honor, who now stand to collect more awards for a single movie than they might once have amassed over the course of their entire careers. There has also been a noticeable uptick in the number of bloggers and reporters now flocking annually to the once relatively media-free Telluride Film Festival, which, thanks to a remarkable track record of including multiple future Best Picture nominees in its very discerning selection, has become seen as the true kickoff to the fall awards race.
Whether this is for good or ill, I won't hazard to guess. Certainly, thanks to the Internet more people now know more about the business of making movies than ever before, and to try to pretend that movies are only an art and not also a business is a fool's errand indeed. But I do fear that when the reporting shifts too much towards the hype and marketing and other noise surrounding a movie's release and away from an intelligent discussion of the movies themselves, we lose something valuable in the process.
Place us in a selection committee meeting. What are the conversations? What are the disagreements? How are they resolved?
Well, that's the $64,000 question, isn't it? Over the years, more than one documentary filmmaker has approached the Film Society about documenting the NYFF selection process, which we have always politely declined. If the cameras were permitted to roll, however, the footage would probably be markedly less dramatic than most people imagine. Although I suspect the NYFF has weathered more contentious eras, speaking for my own five years on the committee what might surprise people most is how much rapport there is among the five committee members, despite our very different backgrounds, the different audiences we write for, and (as anyone who reads us knows) our differences of taste. In part, that's because everyone is consciously working towards the same goal--a balanced program that paints a vivid picture of world cinema today. That may mean having to discard a few personal favorites along the way, or even finding yourself arguing the merits of a film that you yourself don't feel much enthusiasm for. A programmer always has to keep the bigger picture of the entire festival program--and the audience's interaction with that program--in mind in a way that a critic, engaging directly with one particular film, does not.
What do you most look forward to at each year's festival? What do you least look forward to at each year's festival?
I think the things you look forward to and the things you don't are very much one in the same. On the one hand, I love the selection process, because it's exciting to go into a theater every morning and know next to nothing about what you're going to see next, except maybe the title and who directed it. On the other hand, as I once wrote about, the process is both physically and psychologically exhausting in the way of few things I have ever experienced in life. By comparison, the actual festival in the fall is a breeze, though there are still a lot of very long days (and nights) and the constant pressure to make sure we put on the best show possible.
What's your favorite festival memory?
Introducing a sold-out midnight screening of Abel Ferrara's Go Go Tales in 2007 with the always unpredictable Ferrara in a very lively mood, and an audience that included Grace Jones and the inimitable Sylvia Miles. Things got progressively stranger as the night wore on, culminating in a 2 AM Q&A session that those who were present still speak of fondly.
What's your advice for aspiring festival programmers?
Keep your eyes open and your ears to the ground--exciting and unexpected things are happening all the time in moviemaking, and sometimes from the places you least expect. Keep your mind open too--no work should ever be dismissed out of hand just because it may not ostensibly seem like a "festival" movie, whatever that means anyway. Above all, never underestimate the intelligence of the audience--they're smarter and more curious than they usually get credit for, ready to go on the journey so long as you point the way.
BFI London Film Festival (October 12 - 27)
Title: Artistic Director
How many years have you been with the festival?
Fourteen years, and Artistic Director for nine.
How many films are in this year's festival? How many films were submitted?
We will be screening 204 feature films (including documentary features) and 110 shorts. Just under 4,000 films were submitted/considered.
Approximately how much time is spent planning your program each year?
We spend pretty much all year, in that as soon as we've done wrap up from one festival we start working on the next one. However, our festival team here at the BFI also organizes The London Lesbian and Gay Festival, so roughly twenty five percent of our time is taken up with that. But the LFF is a year round job.
What are you looking forward to most this year?
Seeing films I love screen in front of London audiences for the first time. When audiences respond well, that's the very best thing that can happen. I'm also looking forward to welcoming some of my favorite filmmakers back to the festival, such as Fernando Meirelles, Terence Davies, Frederick Wiseman, Jonas Mekas, Lynne Ramsay, Azazel Jacobs, Hirokazu Kore-eda, Nuri Bilge Ceylan, the Dardenne Brothers, Carol Morley, Michael Winterbottom, Nanni Moretti, Bouli Lanners, Nicolas Klotz and Elisabeth Percival, as well as a host of up and coming directors. And our series of screen talks and masterclasses are always fascinating, and I love how generous the people taking part always are with their time and their ideas.
How would you define your festival's identity, and how does it fit into the festival circuit?
We're a public festival, historically known as a 'festival of festivals' but now also garnering a reputation where films can be launched. Our program is broad based, from previews of anticipated films to more under the radar work, and includes a program section on artists' film and video and one of restorations from the world's archives.
How has festival programming changed since you started? (In terms of politics, number of fests, volume of films, etc.)
As we're not an A-grade competitive festival with a requirement for world premieres, we are refreshingly free of politics for the most part. Of course there has been a massive proliferation of festivals in recent years, but that hasn't really had much of an impact on us. Volume of films has definitely increased, mostly thanks to the changes in production technology, but that's led to some interesting work coming through that would have been impossible to make even five years ago.
Has awards season's ascendancy impacted the fall festival climate for better or worse?
It has certainly had an impact for us, and a beneficial one. Our dates and location mean we are very well situated to platform many of the most likely awards contenders and many film companies tie in their LFF screenings with their BAFTA and Academy Award push.
Place us in a selection committee meeting. What are the conversations? What are the disagreements? How are they resolved?
We don't work with a selection committee. As well as the programming that is done in-house by Michael Hayden our Festival Programmer and myself, we have a group of around twelve program advisers, each of whom has expertise in a particular area of cinema. They make recommendations, and it's my job to determine the overall shape and balance of the program. I wouldn't describe them as disagreements, but we do have robust discussions when advisers invariably recommend more titles than we have space for. But we're all in a situation of having to prioritize our titles, and hopefully no-one ever feels too disgruntled!
What do you most look forward to at each year's festival? What do you least look forward to at each year's festival?
I think what I look forward to is pretty much covered in my answer to Q4. In terms of what I least look forward to, that would be the lack of sleep.
What's your favorite festival memory?
I've got lots of them so it's hard and a bit invidious to choose. I love it when audience members come up and tell me that they've liked a film or that it's resonated with them, so I suppose one cherished memory is the first time a film received a standing ovation in my time here. It was a packed out screening of The Straight Story, and when David Lynch brought on Richard Farnsworth at the end of the film, 850 reserved Brits got to their feet. Not a dry eye in the house.
What's your advice for aspiring festival programmers?
Oh goodness, that's a tough question. I think "go with your gut instinct" is probably the best I can do. Never make the mistake of thinking that anything is more important than the films and filmmakers (certainly not the programmer!). And learn how to let people down gently.
AFI Fest (Nov. 3 - 10)
Title: Festival Director
How many years have you been with the festival?
7 years
How many films are in this year's festival? How many films were submitted?
We had over three thousand submissions. We haven't finished programming this year's festival yet but we're on track to have about 100 films in the festival, including shorts.
Approximately how much time is spent planning your program each year?
As soon as the festival ends, we start planning the next year. It's a year-round process of programming, sponsorship and putting together a team. We start watching films at Sundance and Lane Kneedler, the Associate Director of Programming and I will be at TIFF in a few weeks; they have a great line-up in Toronto this year.
What are you looking forward to most this year?
I am looking forward to celebrating AFI FEST's 25th edition and having Pedro Almodóvar join us at the festival's Guest Artistic Director. We are going to have a special screening of Law of Desire to celebrate the 25th anniversary of the film and his production company El Deseo, where he's made so many incredible films.
How would you define your festival's identity, and how does it fit into the festival circuit?
Because of our timing, we're definitely a part of the kick off to awards season and at the same time we consistently have an extremely diverse world cinema program with significant works from masters and emerging filmmakers that we've selected from festivals all over the world. We give the Los Angeles audience an opportunity to see these films as we head into awards season and at the same give the filmmakers an opportunity to be a part of that dialogue. In addition, our alliance with AFM makes us the only festival in North American with a market partnership.
And additionally, we've opened up more slots for emerging directors in our Young Americans, New Auteurs and Breakthrough sections.
There are definitely more festivals on the landscape and because of the shifts in technology, there are more independent films. Although, in the last few years, it's been really difficult to get films made, however, it's feels like this year, there is an abundance of great cinema.
Has awards season's ascendancy impacted the fall festival climate for better or worse?
The art house distribution landscape has changed dramatically over the past ten years and that's put fall festivals in a position to bring much needed attention to great performances, independent films, and foreign films that perhaps wouldn't be seen otherwise, so I think that the fall festival season has become even more important for films.
Place us in a selection committee meeting. What are the conversations? What are the disagreements? How are they resolved?
We are really passionate about the films that we select and when we meet with our associate programmers and our screeners, the goal is to find out which films they feel the most strongly about. Filmmaking is an art and we are tasked with the difficult job of curating a program based on a year's worth of festival screenings and submissions. We don't have disagreements really, but we have a lot of debate and it makes the program stronger every year.
What do you most look forward to at each year's festival? What do you least look forward to at each year's festival?
I look forward to meeting all of the filmmakers when they arrive at the festival. And I look forward to the Audience Awards. It's great to find out which films the audiences are really connecting with. And I hate having to say goodbye to filmmakers; I don't look forward to that all. The filmmakers bring the festival to life.
What's your favorite festival memory?
Opening night of the festival last year. It was my first year as the director of the festival and it was amazing to see all of the moving parts come together.
What's your advice for aspiring festival programmers?
Volunteer for a film festival and see every film that you can between your shifts. My first job at a film festival was as a volunteer for the Toronto International Film Festival.
[Top photo: Shutterstock; programmer photos via Telluride Film Festival, Thom Powers, Film Society of Lincoln Center, BFI, and AFI]