Assignment Two | Week 6 Reflection

This week we had a guest lecture and Q&A with Mia Falstein-Rush, the Submissions & Shorts Programmer at the Melbourne International Film Festival (MIFF). Honestly, I thought having Mia in to talk about her experiences with both MIFF and her own personal festival, ‘Seen and Heard’, was invaluable, although potentially meeting with her earlier in the semester would have helped to battle a few problems and allow us some greater insights for issues we faced along the way. 

One thing that would have helped to cut down a lot of time in the programming department would have been to add a submissions fee (if only a small one) when we listed the event on Film Freeway. As Mia noted, if someone believes in their film enough, they’ll pay the fee to have it seen. After this, we did attach a $5AUD fee to all submissions- keeping it so low (unlike MIFF’s $60 fee) so that people from even impoverished countries would be able to submit.

Other advice Mia passed along included the fact that people, especially businesses/potential investors, are very time poor and don’t have the time nor want to read through pages and paragraphs of text. While we were on the right track by having a sponsor’s package (go Bridie!), it ended up being too wordy/time-consuming to read and needed to be shortened.

Overall, as stated in the reading as well as by Mia, we need to know our audience. Mia explained that with her ‘Seen and Heard’ festival, the audience was ‘women’ in the media/film industry as she wanted to create a film festival that highlighted the gender gap and celebrate female creators. I think we’ve done a really good job with knowing who our audience is for MIYFF- a film festival made ‘by youths, for youths’ and while we may still feel as though we’re scrambling about in many ways, we seem to be on track in this regard.

 

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