My FB posts from today's film festival opening night seem to have angered the festival management.
Do you not intend such, on most occasions?
I have seen you dis' this fest upon several occasions, but you might need it to survive. I like both!
PLEEZ, expound.
Yes. It's a survival technique. But also, they should take themselves less seriously. They sometimes have their heads so high up their arses that there cannot possibly be any oxygen left.
The festival is full of films, w but with about the same ratio between good and bad as the ones in general distribution. The difference is that there are films from countries that would never get the chance at any commercial cinema. That's all. They're not better than the rest, just different, and the management would do well to remember this.
Instead, they pretend there is a difference beyond these simple facts. It's pretentious and it's boring, and I am here to help them realise this.
At past festivals, I used to screen lots of shorts from all around the world. Some of these were fabulous. Inventive, intelligent, and funny, and often better than the main features they preceded. There was a reason why somebody paid for the 35mm prints and the cost of distribution.
The shorts are mostly gone, except for the Swedish shorts screened before every day's new Nordic feature at 17.30. The problem with these--and this goes for both the shorts and the features--is that Sweden, or Scandinavia, isn't big enough to produce enough quality film to fill these spots. Instead, the films tend to be amateurish, pretentious and very frequently boring.
Now, the 17.30 spot is the next best, perhaps even the best, spot of the day. At the cinema where I work, this means that the main attraction should be good enough to fill 700+ seats. See where this is going? Most of the time, the quality just isn't there.
There have been exceptions through the years, of course. Huge success stories that became the stuff of legend for filmmakers and tangible enough for producers to fight for those spots. But most of them have been easily (and mercifully) forgotten.