Thursday, February 19, 2009

FEBRUARY 2009: Back From Europe, Pt. 1


A number of weeks back, I took a close look at the works that came in through our Open Call as well as the works we solicited from various film festivals around the world and came to the conclusion that in order to make our programming truly special, I was going to have to take a week out of February, when the bulk of our programming decisions would be made and confirmed, and travel once again to Germany to seek out works (and in select cases, lock down confirmations that were "sitting on the fence") at the European Film Market and the Berlinale, or Berlin International Film Festival. The decision to travel into another cold weather film festival so soon after enduring the biting cold and lukewarm offering of the Sundance Film Festival was not taken lightly: since we decided five years ago that trekking to South Korea in the fall to attend the Pusan International Film Festival to seek out new works was a more productive business itinerary for me, I've always found myself looking towards Europe to see what the programmers of the Berlinale were up to. Though not primarily known as a film festival that focusses on Asian international cinema the way that PIFF does, the Berlinale nevertheless offers a daring, if slim, profile of new Asian cinema; and through its complementary European Film Market, a gathering place to discover new works in an environment decidedly more intense and frenzied than the main Festival itself.

Though I've attended events in the past few months that, on paper, should have yielded a crop of new selections, the fact is that such selections can't be guaranteed to possess a long shelf life. Some works are quickly swept up into "distributor hell" and long-term "festival strategies" (a common code that exposes a producer's wishes that their work is deserving of mainstream festival exposure, at the expense of the less obvious dividends that specialty film festivals such as ours can yield); while other times, selections I was initially excited about just don't hold up well. The reality is that year after year there will always be that crop of programming "spoils," and in order to minimize the prospect that our committee would be obliged to select from a crop of so-called "leftovers," I made the decision to trek to Berlin and see if the new works that emerged subsequent to our jaunt through the American Film Market in November and Sundance in mid-January would be accessible to us.

Another, stressful reason for going had to do with securing works I saw last October at PIFF, when they weren't yet screened but in final-cut stages. Since then I made some invitation for select films only to discover that they have been indeed invited to Berlinale and its heavyweight precursor, the International Film Festival Rotterdam. So, my mission was simple: secure the films that may fall through the cracks, and view brand-new works that could possibly make it into our program in May.

As I'm writing this entry on the plane on the way back from Berlin (the Festival just concluded a couple of hours ago, according to the clock on my laptop), I'm still processing the week that was, and will be sending off follow-up letters in the next day to take care of the final details.

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