Q: Your festival
calls itself a “multimedia festival,” what might make your festival different
from a film festival?
A: I don’t know, we’re totally different. We call it a
multimedia festival, because we want to emphasize that we do experimental film,
we do multi-screening, presentations it varies
Q: Like triptychs?
A: Right! And we also do performances with audience
participation and props and films as part of it. Like [artists] came here
this year and did a special multimedia presentation, and we accept scripts,
so it’s different from a typical film festival.
Q: How many entries
did TRMF get this year?
A: Let me check. I think it was… 482
Q: Wow, how many films were short films and how many were features?
A: Well I’d say probably 10% were features and 35% short
films, and then we get, maybe, 10% is experimental, which are also short, typically.
Q: How many films do
you aim to screen each year?
A: It really depends on what’s hot that year. We’ve had
years where we had 10 feature films that were great, and, you know, we might
end up fewer films. But, normally, with the mix we’ve been getting over the
years, we’ve been showing anywhere from 45 to 65 films, and what we’ve done to
allow more feature films is we’ve changed our screening method so that throughout
the year we have Friday night programmes where we schedule award-winning
features throughout the Friday night series.
Q: Yeah, I saw that
your programme past winners throughout the year?
A: Well, the winners that year. So, like last year for
instance, we showed Bad Ideas, which
was an experimental feature film that we didn’t show during the regular
festival due to time restraints. We coordinated with filmmakers and they came
last Friday with several little cast members and crew, and we do those special little
presentations throughout the year now.
Q: How many
papers/presentations do you accept?
A: That depends too. This year we’re having more than usual,
because we originally scheduled our Iranian poster exhibit during the festival.
We were going to have an Iranian section, but the funding was delayed until
October, so we’re doing that next month and bringing [a doctor] from Columbia
University in. He’s doing a special Iranian presentation, not only in our
facility, but also at the university, UNCA.
Q: A little different
question, what is your pre-screening process?
A: Pretty much, we do 5 people pre-screen, and I look at
everything. The other 4 people do certain categories, like scripts or short
films, feature films, animation, experimental, documentary. So, those people
check those out, then I check them all out, and it goes to a jury after that.
The ones obviously called that cannot be in the running aren’t an official
selection - usually due to some inappropriate material, like pornography.
Q: So what kinds of
people do you usually chose to be those pre-screeners?
A: Again, that depends every year, but normally we go to the
MAP, the media arts organization here in Asheville. We try to select
pre-screeners that are members of MAP, and we also coordinate with Mechanical
Eye. It’s an experimental film organization in Asheville, and they did our
experimental/animation pre-screening and jurying.
Q: How far in advance
do you send out your call for entries?
A: We start November first, for our main programme.
Q: How do those
submissions roll in? Are they usually a whole lot of them early, and then they
stagger out, or a lot of them last minute, or does it just come in waves?
A: It definitely comes in waves. It comes in waves around
our deadlines. The early bird deadline, it hits hard. The regular deadline hits
hard, and then all extended deadlines, of course, are hammered with last minute
[entries].
Q: How many paid employees
do you have each year, and how many volunteers?
A: Zero paid, and maybe ten volunteers here.
Q: Do you use
specific software for your programming, trafficking, budgeting?
A: The only software we really use is- we download from
Withoutabox, and we use our own developed template that we’ve developed over
the years, just on Excel, nothing special. It works for us, we like it.
Q: Yeah that’s sort
of what we’re doing this year with our file system, building from the ground
up.
A: Yeah, it can be daunting, but it’s worth it.
Q: What kinds of community
outreach programmes do you have to, sort of, keep aware of your festival when
it’s not running?
A: Well, like I say, we show films every Friday night, and
most of those are classical cinema. But we keep a film society going every week
with excellent films or films from our own festival that we didn’t have time to
screen but that were official selections and we want to show them. That’s one
thing. There’re other programmes, like this Iranian poster programme, or we
have a Monday night open mic that we actively encourage filmmakers to come to.
So, everybody has a ten minutes slot, so it would be a long flim or a ten
minutes section of a long film, but, you know, they perform along with
musicians or comics or poets and writers, and that helps keep everybody
informed that we do film and we encourage them.
Q: That was one of
the things that - when I was researching your festival – that I liked a lot,
was that it seemed to be very much a part of the landscape, in Asheville,
whereas here the festival that we put on is localized to the campus, and it’s
all in one building as opposed to where you guys use several local venues, and
that gets people through the whole city, which I like a lot. I wish our
festival could do that more.
A: Well there’s pros and cons to that, but one of the ways
we’ve gotten around the cons, which is getting to the students, is, like right
now, we’re showing a documentary series in our venue that is required
attendance from two classes at the university, and the community can come as
well. So we just started that this year, and you know we’ve had to move it into
the flood gallery because we’ve had 100-120 people show up. So, that’s how
we’re trying to keep the students involved in knowing who we are and what we
do, and, as you know, with students it’s a revolving door. So, it’s important
that we keep the students coming to our facility with everything we can think
of like a documentary series.
Q: Do you guys give
out small gifts to your filmmakers and guests?
A: No, we’re a very barebones film festival, haha – no red
carpets, no champaigne – but we do have an opening reception with a little bit
of wine there, but we don’t do the big receptions or anything. It depends
because technical film festivals really like that red carpet stuff, but I never
really liked it.
Q: Are you able to
provide your filmmakers and presenters with funds to cover the travel and
lodging to show up to your festival?
A: Well we bring in a scholar that’s always covered.
Occasionally we can help with filmmakers that want to come. But, normally it’s through
grants, like the NC humanities council grants or other grants, and it’s
whatever we can pick up from those grants, but every year we have some kind of
presentation that’s covered by a grant.
Q: Do you try and
treat your attendees to, sort of – like if we get filmmakers and scholars here
in Wilmington we try to take them to the beach and we’ll try to show them the
Screen Gems lot – do you have anything in Asheville that you encourage them to
partake in while they’re there, apart form the venues?
A: Yeah we usually try to take them over to the peace
garden, where people do poetry and presentations, and occasionally we’ll take
people out to the tours at the mug factory.
Q: I couldn’t find a
kickstarter or indiegogo crowd-funding campaign for your festival, but I was
wondering if you offered any perks to your donors, like a montion in your
programmes?
A: Yeah, we always mention the donors. Occasionally for big
donors we’ll have reserved seats for presentations. We’ll do things like that.
We used to [have sponsors], and we found that we’re really anti-sponsorship
now. Because, several years ago, a sponsor really started dictating to us what
they wanted and what they didn’t want, and once we got out from under that
sponsorship we’ve been really wary of sponsors.
Q: What do you wish
you’d done differently, or better, when the festival was first starting out?
A: We definitely should have coordinated more with
nonprofits and other people, and now we have the press behind us. We have
Mechanical Eye that does experimental film, MAP - that helps us with shorts and
features. We should’ve reached our more, but we started out here a little weary
of that, of what people’s motivations are, their agendas. But, as long as you
have a clear idea of who you are and know your agenda, it’s better to reach
out. It helps.
Q: Any other ideas or
advice that I haven’t asked you about yet that you like to say?
A: I don’t know really. I mean our festival is for
filmmakers. We’re really not interested in anyone else. I mean, if we have a
great audience, we’re really happy, because they’re there connecting with some
filmmakers, and they ask a lot of really great questions, and the filmmakers
appreciate it. But, our festival is geared towards filmmakers. Maybe we should
be more active in getting a bigger audience every year at our events, but it’s
really just not our agenda. Our agenda is to help filmmakers, and encourage
them, and present their work, and give them moral support.
Q: Yeah, the one
thing that I liked the most about your festival was that you guys have a very
clear idea of who you are and who you want to be.
A: Yeah, if there was any advice I could give any film
festival, I would say “find out who you are and go with it- run with it.”
