At our Your Festival Your Community event back in April we were delighted to have attending, students from the University of Edinburgh’s MSc in Exhibition and Curation. In the first of five reports by the students reflecting on the event, Amanda Rogers considered what she learned about how local film festivals serve their audiences in unique and inventive ways.
At Your Festival, Your Community a range of different speakers from various regional festivals around Scotland shared their experiences and advice to fellow festival programmers, curators, and exhibitors. Moreover, the event acted not only as a celebration of these regional festivals, but also as a meetup for festivals around the country to come together, talk about best practices, and share the work they have done. What was clear from this event was the vast amount of innovation that occurs in regional festivals around Scotland as well as the diverse array of audiences that are reached through these efforts.
From the mobile Screen Machine, to projecting on lighthouses, and pop-up exhibition spaces in abandoned buildings, the various ways in which films were screened are imaginative and created for their local audiences. A small town might not have as many traditional spaces for cinema exhibition as a large metropolis, and so they find creative ways to project films, sometimes even relying on a local’s house as a space for public film exhibition. This ingenuity, in part done out of necessity from small budgets and scant resources, is met with an equal influx of community involvement through local business partnership, locally born patrons, and community volunteers. What results from these efforts seems to be a great deal of pride and ownership from the local communities itself. While one festival does this by letting the community decide on which films they will screen at the festival, even with festivals like the Hippodrome Festival in Bo’ness that play old, silent films or the Alchemy Festival in Hawick that showcases experimental film from around the world, the local communities seem to be incredibly proud and engaged with these festivals and its moving image material even if it is considered less mainstream and somewhat challenging to general audiences. The talks in the morning demonstrated that there is quite a desire from these communities to go out and see all of these many kinds of film material, and with the ingenuity, passion, of perseverance from these festival organizers, quite a lot of different material can be shown in unique ways.
In the workshop on How to Start a Film Festival, film festival veteran and curator, Matt Lloyd, gave newly formed festival organizers some tips on surviving, something that he admitted was not an easy thing to do. One thing that particularly stood out to me was his reference to food and the film experience. Recalling a film festival he coordinated for Tilda Swinton and Mark Cousins in an old abandoned Ballroom in Nairn, where the price of admission was bringing a tray bake to share instead of money, it was clear that there are other elements at play in a successful regional festival more than just the red carpets of Cannes or the reclining seats of a Cineplex. These things might include comfort food, familiar and domestic-like exhibition space, but it most definitely involves a feeling of community participation and a sense of passion and creativity by the organizers themselves. The festivals highlighted at Your Festival Your Community and the conversations I had some with some of their organizers and contributors during the networking break-out sessions really demonstrated that many festivals organizers around Scotland possess these resourceful & inventive qualities, and they will continue to offer their communities a whole host of memorable film experiences for many years to come.
Read more from the University of Edinburgh’s students here and here.