Looking at the Europa film festival brochure sets a pretty intimidating standard, as there is a lot of work and detail that goes into it. As a programmer, the Europa Festival films were pretty impressive with most of them being brand new films debuting at their festival. Though our festival focused on older films, their wide selection of films in terms of genre and directorial skill/ability is something i wanted to emulate in our catalogue. Europa mixed both animation and live-action in their program which we refrained from doing as we wanted to solely focus on live-action which usually lends itself to more indie budgets in terms of quality on display. Another notable thing in Europa’s catalogue was 4K restorations of the three-colour trilogy, in a similar vein we had hoped to get Peter Jackson’s first film on 70mm, but sadly that didn’t work out. I think we could have attracted a much larger crowd if we had something like a restoration or screened an actual film in our program, though it was a matter of circumstances that we did not sadly.

The fantastic film festival was similar, as they had both new releases and restorations of older, cult classic films. I think Fantastic’s reason for success is its location at Lido, a popular cinema for students that provides cheap tickets giving a higher incentive to seek out the fantastic festival. If i had to take anything from Fantastic Film Festival I think it would be their pricing and location, although much like other changes these were a little out of our hands as a smaller film festival trying to scrape by.