The week it begins just so happens to be the week that I am hit with extreme and undiscriminating illness!  I was unfortunately absent from both classes as a result but that won’t stop me from talking about the beginning of the festival like I was involved!

I somehow ended up on the graphic design team.  Now, to clarify, I have no graphic design experience whatsoever.  I have the artistic chops of a dung beetle.  But I also have the self-motivation and get-things-done-quick attitude of the dung beetle and started to design a logo.  Naturally, this lead people to believe that I was interested in doing this long term.  There is a very intense and design-oriented group chat that I am a part of, and in which I can contribute virtually nothing, so this is an excellent start to the festival for me.

As a result of my illness, I had time to READ!  Something that really stood out to me was the Fred Kramer quote “the proliferation of film festivals is not sustainable. There will be some kind of attrition very soon.”  This seemed to be the consensus throughout the article, from plenty of experts, and indeed from Richard Sowada in his lecture.  Despite my past two depressing blog posts (apologies for those), I think I disagree.  The attrition refers not to a destruction of film festivals as a whole, but to an abundance of bad film festivals.  I think what needs to be recognized is that quality in itself can be extremely subjective.  For example, a cult film such as The Room is of low quality, but people celebrate it and create screenings and rituals around it.  A dingy, dive style venue such as Yah Yahs is of low quality, but people go in abundance because they enjoy the atmosphere.  If we assume that film festivals are only great if they include the highest quality films, venues, guests, etc, we are actively ignoring some of the worlds greatest and most fun things.  To assume that the amount of planning that goes into these low budget, start-up film festivals is not of the same quality as the planning that goes into something like Sundance is to state that having money is equal to having taste, drive, ambition, or ability.  This type of mentality is similar to the mentality that ‘millennials are uncultured’ despite culture rapidly changing and the new ability to reach culture previously unavailable to us.  It just seems a little elitest.