My Lunch with Carlos

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.”