The Pleasures and Displeasures
of Attending Festivals
by Klaus Eder, General Secretary of FIPRESCI
What is FIPRESCI?

I am writing these lines in a hotel room in San Sebastian, Spain. It's a room with a view on the Concha - the beach, the bay, a blue sky. You've got some reason to envy me. One of the attractions of the San Sebastian International Festival is indeed San Sebastian. The marvelous old city. The bars with those delicious small sandwiches which they call tapas. The beach, 36 degrees, the other day. If you're politically interested: the manifestations pro and contra the separatists of the ETA. Want me to continue?

Much of the pleasure festivals are offering comes from the cities where they are taking place. Venice. Cannes. Locarno. Singapore. Karlovy Vary. Rio de Janeiro. Pusan. Thessaloniki… For some people it's always interesting to visit Berlin or London or New York, taking the festivals as pretext. I have been attending Venice since the late 60s, and every time returning to the Lido I'm struck by the beauty of the city. Cannes at the time of the festival is disgusting, but it's still a wonderful place. Can you imagine the festival of Venice not taking place in Venice but, let's say, in Padua? Nobody would probably ever take notice of such an event. Aren't festivals professional as well as tourist events? It's astonishing that the majority of festivals do not take place in capital cities - not in Paris but in Cannes, not in Rome but in Venice, not in Madrid but in San Sebastian. They are the more attractive tourist places, where you can better enjoy life.

The other pleasure festivals are providing me with is to meet people. My critic colleagues , the filmmakers, festival organizers, distributors. Those before and those behind the camera. Back home in Munich, I would warm up some plastic food from the fridge, and would sit in front of the TV watching some stupid show. If I would see such a scene in a movie, I would say "Oh, how disgusting!" At festivals, you have lunch or dinner, or lunch and dinner with your colleagues, many of them having become friends over the years. You talk about cinema, about restaurants, about life, you gossip of course about colleagues. San Sebastian has a wide range of excellent restaurants (not to mention the wine from the region). It happens again and again that you meet people you might have heard of but never met, and it very often turns out that you speak the same language even if you don't speak the same language. It seems that cinema unites the milieu to a kind of family. You make an acquaintance with someone, and meeting him a second time, you've already the feeling that you know each other since forever. I don't know any other profession with such strong relations within the "family". Festivals treat this family very often in a very friendly, warm-hearted and hospitable way - the smaller the event, the friendlier.

And there are of course films to be seen. If I would have to rely on films being commercially released in Germany, I would dry out. I would miss the bigger - even the biggest - part of the world film production. Some of the films could be missed anyway. To miss others would be a pity, in particular if you want to know what is going on in cinema nowadays. The rise of Asian cinema has not been discovered by commercial releases but has started at festivals, and after Asian films have been praised and awarded again and again, they finally reached regular cinemas. Attend festivals, and you are familiar with the actual development. Don't attend festivals, and you're the last one enjoying modern world cinema.

At the major festivals, it's a professional duty of critics to follow the central competition sections. But it's a pleasure to visit the side bars - the Quinzaine in Cannes, the Forum in Berlin, the Open Zone (Zabaltegi) in San Sebastian. These are the places where films can be discovered (and as a film critic, one should have a certain curiosity). There are festivals like Rotterdam or Locarno which are even dedicated to discoveries - to films, to directors, to countries which are known maybe among professionals, but are unknown to the public. The programmers of these events are curious themselves, they are open-minded, and they are courageous enough not to care about the mainstream but to foster interesting films wherever they might come from.

In most festivals, at least the bigger ones, it is physically impossible to see all films you would like to see. In Cannes, including the market projections, you've the chance to choose between around one hundred films a day. Fortunately, there are films which in spite of having only limited chances for a commercial distribution, do make a festival career, being programmed in one festival after the next, up to 50 and more times. For the local public it does not matter at all if a film has been shown in previous festivals, and for critics and other professionals it's a chance to see films which they've missed earlier.

There's, however, a disastrous mentality among the twenty or thirty leading festivals to show films for the first time, to show them at least the first time out of their country of origin. Most festival directors are proud of presenting world premieres or at least international premieres. This is of course OK in regard to the competition shows at the top events of Cannes, Berlin, Venice. It's the rules of the game. But for the rest? Why does the Forum in Berlin refuse to show films which have been presented two weeks earlier in Rotterdam? Why does Locarno refuse to show films which have been presented earlier in Karlovy Vary or Munich? How many professionals are attending Rotterdam and Berlin, Karlovy Vary and Locarno, Montreal and Venice? Five? Ten? This concurrence is carried out to sharpen one's own profile as a festival, and which is not at all in favor of movies. It would be reasonably cheaper to offer a print and a director from, let's say, Argentina or Korea the chance to attend two European festivals in a row. But some festival directors seem stubbornly to insist on the "right to the first night". This may help the festivals. It does not help the films.

The situation is even worse. To prevent films from going to Cannes, Berlin invented more and more sections. These sections are in a heavy concurrence even with each other. The Berlin Panorama has been invented to take films off the Forum, as well as the Certain Regard section in Cannes has been established to take films off the Quinzaine, and the Quinzaine takes films off the critic's week. It's a rude behavior going on between festivals. The bigger one eats the smaller one. As if festivals would not have to serve films, but films would have to serve the profile of festivals. It's stupid, isn't it. But it's like this, and no reasonable argumentation was capable to change this by now.

There are, of course, exceptions. There are festivals which don't care about earlier projections of the films they program. Toronto includes a 'festival of festivals'. And, imagine: it works. The San Sebastian Open Zone does so and it's a pleasure for the public, as well as for critics like me, who get the chance to catch up on films missed earlier.

And what if it happens that there's a film which you have already seen? It's a welcome situation. Because you can finally enjoy the city, the friends, the restaurants and the view on the Concha.

Klaus Eder