In light of our latest poll ‘To upload, or not’, we’ve asked Festival Programmer and Film Journalist Kate Taylor what her thoughts are on festivals that won’t accept work that already exists online. Is it a wise strategy or snobby game playing? Kate mounts her soap box to tell Shooters of her experience.

By Kate Taylor

You are a programmer and you’ve just had one of those brilliant moments where you’re at a festival and you have discovered a film that’s got all your cinephile senses tingling. You know that your audience will connect with it, will argue about it, will understand it in a particular way. You meet the filmmaker, get on well, the producer is keen and all is well. On the journey home you visualise the campaign, the event, the way you can place the film in your programme to maximize its presence. Then arrives the e-mail, “we’ve been advised to wait for X festival, and they need a premiere, so will no longer be able to confirm a screening at your festival…”

The premiere rule is a strange film festival hang-up. As someone who organises and supports smaller festivals people tend to assume I am dead set against it. It’s true I have experienced plenty of variations on the above scenario, complete with shaking fists at the sky (damn you McGill!), but on the whole for new festivals and the majority of UK indie filmmakers making shorts and lo-budget features I just think its becoming irrelevant. However, it is still worth examining why it exists.

In the UK the two biggies are Edinburgh International Film Festival (EIFF) and London Film Festival (LFF). Their stringency differs, and on occasion they’ll look at films on a case by case basis, but on the whole they want firsts. So no internet sites and no other prior UK screenings.

As part of an international film festival calendar, EIFF and LFF are not themselves immune to getting trumped by other international fests. In an interview with Eye For Film this week EIFF festival director Hannah McGill speaks about how Edinburgh occasionally suffers with filmmakers holding out for a premiere in Cannes.

This same argument could be used by other festivals outside of Edinburgh and London. Could a smaller festival give more prominence and attention to a single film that may otherwise be buried in a vast programme?  Is a passionate programmer more likely to talk about it to peers and press? Should filmmakers have to forego local screenings at nearby festivals, often places that have nurtured their development in the past?

For London the red carpet is a key marketing element and so premieres are an important part of its identity – an aura of special newness, with glamorous talent in attendance.  That’s fine, but with shorts does it even matter? No offence short filmmakers, but I don’t often see Simon Ellis in the pages of the Evening Standard.

I’d argue the rule has more impact on shorts than on features in the UK, as shorts have a limited audience and the enthusiasm you feel for a short when you first see it is sometimes dampened a year later when you are able to put it on and you’ve seen plenty since. As an example, a film shown in Rotterdam in January that has been picked up by London cannot be shown in the whole of the UK until October. Meaning that any festival whose dates fall in between that period will not be able to screen it until the following year.

A particularly disheartening experience of this has been LFF pulling a short from a summer music festival, leaving me to do a Q&A with a grumpy screenwriter about a short film we couldn’t even show the crowd. Would this audience of 300 people in a tent in Suffolk have jeopardized the film getting an audience in London three months later? Doubtful. They might even have helped create a buzz around it.

With feature films the rules makes more sense as here festivals are an element of a business strategy for securing distribution or marketing a theatrical release.

It would be good to get a steer from press, both specialist and general, as coverage is often given as a reason on why festivals should retain premiere rules.  Does it matter to Empire or Sight and Sound or the broadsheets if a festival is chock full of premieres?  Or alternatively would they get snooty in their coverage if they felt they’d seen the films elsewhere? And while arts coverage in local press may be dwindling across the UK, what of the new wave of bloggers who are often the best source of on the ground festival reviews?

Beyond press it is also an issue around funding.  I wonder how important it is to many funders and stakeholders, who are another important audience who need reporting to. Some will be interested in the narrative of a festival and its artistic programme, but many sponsors may not even be film-related and for them statistics such as the number of World or UK premieres, commissions or awards are clear quantifiable data.

There are also certain networks festivals belong to.  The concept of category A and B festivals still exists, London is a member of the International Federation of Film Producers Associations (FIAPF) and I don’t know what the rules are regarding Oscar qualifying festivals, or FIPRESCI recognised events.

On top of this there are your peers from other festivals, which is important to industry festivals and less important to local events.  As a programmer I must admit I want to go to festivals where I’m seeing films for the first time and have that sense of discovery.  And discovery is what EIFF are pushing as their Sundance-esque raison d’etre, so I can’t see them dropping the premiere rule any time soon.

Overall its part of a wider ecology about the way festivals frame the work they present, and about finding better ways to tell the stories around a film.  Festivals need to find different ways of framing and celebrating their programme and talking about the work, and festivals like Flatpack, Branchage, Kill Your Timid Notion can put forward a much more imaginative case for the film experience than simply saying its the first. So interesting film festivals at the more indie end of the scale just get on with it, with many of them actually sourcing films online. The weirdest thing is when new or growing festivals decide to impose a premiere rule, for want of prestige, which to me seems insane.

For filmmakers navigating this terrain its about being realistic in expectations of where your film can go and what you want from exhibition. Is it likely to win a prize? Statistically most films don’t. But maybe its great. How patient are you? Do you want a big audience or do you want to visit some interesting locations?

The trouble with the risk of waiting and holding out is that sometimes its clear that films won’t get into X festival and you’re missing out on others that may be more receptive. My advice is always to get someone with both critical distance and exhibition experience to give you an honest appraisal of the film, its chances and the festivals you should aim for.

Filmmakers can be pro-active in their choices as well. Four Lions as an example could have had their pick of premieres, and chose the Bradford International Film Festival, deciding that it was important for them to connect with the audience there, and it paid off well. There is an eclectic spectrum of cool film festivals in the UK outside of the big two, so it’s worth considering more than just the premiere status when considering where to screen.

And finally the people who probably care least of all about premiere status are the most key element to a festival – the audience. So long as it’s not played locally before, then the criteria people use to pick a film are based on plenty of factors, including cast, director, subject, and reviews. But I’d posit that premiere status is not on that list.