ilm Festivals


June 21, 2002


BOB GARFIELD: Whether you are in New York, Arizona or Kentucky chances are you are within 50 miles of the location of a film festival. The popularity of these salutes to the big screen has shot up exponentially in America and abroad and has turned many a small town into a tourist trap for days at a time. There's yet to be an official tally but film buffs estimate that there are anywhere from 500 to 1500 festivals worldwide. L.A. Times and NPR film critic Kenneth Turan detailed some of these festivals in his book Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made. He joins us now. Ken, welcome to OTM.

KENNETH TURAN: Good to be here.

BOB GARFIELD: Let's start with your title: The World They Made. Why did film festivals inform the world around them?

KENNETH TURAN: Well one of the things that happened is that people started to feel that the film industry was not serving them -- there were kinds of theaters, kinds of films that were just not getting around, and the film festival kind of really in some ways filled a need! It turned out that even though you couldn't count on people in any given town to support an art theater, to come in, week in/week out to see interesting, offbeat films -- if you had a film festival for a finite number of days, those people would show up.

BOB GARFIELD: So even if you couldn't get your weekly fix, at least once a year you could binge.

KENNETH TURAN:Exactly. And there are many festivals where people are proud of their bingeing abilities where they tell you they take off work - it's kind of like the World Cup - and they go to as many films as humanly possible and it suffices for the rest of the year.

BOB GARFIELD:Some of the festivals are serving this function of allowing local and regional movie buffs to binge, but others are not a general array of films; they're actually constructed around a theme. Tell me about some of those.

KENNETH TURAN: Well you know the festivals that interested me most were festivals that really gave me a window into how people think about film in other parts of the world. In Burkina Faso in, in West Africa there's a bi-annual festival called Fespaco which is an African film festival which really features African films and which have people from all over the continent kind of show up in this place, and it's important for them as it turns out when you think about it for all of us, to see themselves on screen. People all over the world have a hunger not just for Hollywood but to see representations of their own reality, and some festivals cater to that. But for me the most interesting festival I went to I think was the one in Sarajevo which started during the shelling and continued and it still goes on every year, and I ran into people who literally -- one woman said to me that she ran through shelling to see Basic Instinct. This seems kind of strange, even when you think about it, but what she basically said -this was the only film playing - and to the people in Sarajevo, being able to see a film meant that they were connected to the world.

BOB GARFIELD:Many of these festivals I guess principally Sundance and maybe Telluride are not just festivals but they're also marketplaces where the distribution of hitherto obscure films are locked up and much of what we'll be seeing in 2003 hinges on what's screened popularly at Sundance, say, in 2002. Is this true at other festivals or is that business pretty much isolated to a couple of big ones?

KENNETH TURAN: It's restricted to bigger ones, but there are a lot of them that it happens to. I mean Cannes has the same dynamic where new films appear and people snap them up if they like them and then they play out for the rest of the year. Other festivals such as the one in Toronto have a slightly different twist on that. These are kind of launching pad festivals. Toronto is very well situated in a time frame of mine. It's early in September, right before the fall, which is when the studios and the independent companies like to release their best films, so because there's so many journalists in Toronto, the studios and the independent companies put their fall films in Toronto so that they'll get a lot of publicity; they'll get a great launch.

BOB GARFIELD: The popularity of film festivals has yielded a weird kind of bastard stepchild. The reject festival-- [LAUGHTER] devoted to films rejected by juries of other festivals. Have you attended any of those?

KENNETH TURAN:You know I've never attended them, but I think it is a - kind of an indication of how many films there are and how many festivals there are then and I think in fact there is more than one reject film festival - I think there's 2 or 3! And in fact so many rejected films applied to the reject festivals that the reject festival has started rejecting films. [LAUGHTER] I mean it's just--

BOB GARFIELD: What kind of dogs must they be?

KENNETH TURAN:Yeah, I don't want to think what it's like -the, the filmmaker who gets a letter saying he's been rejected by the reject film festival. [LAUGHTER] That would be a very bleak day.

BOB GARFIELD: Yeah. Well Kenneth Turan, thank you very much.

KENNETH TURAN: Thank you, Bob; I've enjoyed it.

BOB GARFIELD:Kenneth Turan is author of Sundance to Sarajevo: Film Festivals and the World They Made. He also is a film critic for the Los Angeles Times. [MUSIC]