Film festivals often do seem like a scam to me, as they did a long ago
too.
I was once offered a co-judgeship, with no pay, in something called the
Onion City Film Festival, in Chicago. This was in 1987, give or take a
year or two. I declined. I stated to them my two objection to film
festivals: (1) The entry fees and (2) that the judges had to agree among
themselves about prizes, thereby producing all kinds of compromises. In
this festival, there was to be one other judge, and they had $2,000 in
prize money. I suggested that each judge should be able to allocate
$1,000 to entries in whatever manner they saw fit.
To my shock, I got called back a week later, agreeing to the plan for
prize money and stating that they had reduced the entry fee to return
postage. I was charmed, and felt I could not refuse. Even better, my
co-judge turned out to be Gunvor Nelson.
Weirdly, there were two entries to this festival that should not have
happened. One was a film by Sharon Couzin, who actually ran the
organization putting on the film festival. Even more weirdly, she was
away when I was offered a judgeship, and when she returned she was angry
to hear it, saying that I would figure out how to give all the money to
one of my own films — yet she herself had entered, and I certainly had
not. She apparently didn't realize that we could have created maximum
trouble for her by awarding her all the prize money, and jokingly
proposed that to Gunvor, but of course we didn't. The other problematic
entry was a film by Gunner's daughter Oona. We wrote a letter to the
organization suggesting that people who worked on the organization and
their close relatives, and also the close relatives of judges, should
not be permitted to enter.
Since I lately have been making films again myself, I looked into
festivals via "Film Freeway." I'm not sure I would recommend this site,
but have used it to enter a few. I certainly know all the stories — the
judges look at only the first three minutes to see if their attention is
caught; there is a pre-selection committee of teenagers. I wonder if
some AI engine will be "trained" to judge films? I would feed the engine
Brakhage's /Arabics /, Kenji Mizoguchi's /Genroku Chushingura/, and
Samuel Fuller's /Shock Corridor/ as its training in recognizing advanced
cinema art. Anyway, I did enter some, to the tune of a few hundred
dollars, but entered expecting nothing. I was surprised to see that
hardly any give financial prizes. I guess they think that being shown in
their super-fabulous festival is prize enough.
Fred Camper
Chicago
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