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Shaping Contemporary Film Culture B: Themes in Film Festivals

Overview

  • Credit value: 15 credits at Level 7
  • Convenor: to be confirmed
  • Assessment: a 3000-word essay (100%)

Module description

In this module we explore film festivals as a source of curatorial knowledge, and help you develop a critical understanding of festival programming practice. We look at festivals from the curator's point of view, and in particular at the dynamic, creative and dialogic relationship between film and audience that a festival programme sets up.

You will meet film curators working at many kinds of festival. These range from A-list events such as the BFI London Film Festival to specialist festivals built around a genre, a form or a community: documentary, short film, queer, feminist, diasporic or regional (subject to change depending on guests). Most sessions will be a conversation with a working programmer. They talk about how they approach the job, how they find and choose films, how a programme takes shape, and how they think about the audiences they are programming for.

These conversations cover practical skills: viewing and selection, working with distributors and filmmakers, writing and framing a programme, hosting Q&As and events, and dealing with budgets and deadlines. They also look beyond skills to approach and ethics:

  • What makes a festival programme different from a cinema season or an exhibition?
  • How do curators balance premiere status, industry demands and discovery against the needs of local and specialist audiences?
  • What responsibilities come with deciding which films get seen, and by whom?

We also ask what it means to work this way: the rhythms of the festival calendar, the collaborative and often precarious nature of festival labour, and the networks that hold the circuit together.

Indicative syllabus

  • History and socio-political context of film festivals
  • Ideas of location, place and experience
  • Role of the curator at the film festival
  • Practical implications of assembling a festival programme
  • The afterlife of films and the implications of inclusion at festival

Learning objectives

By the end of the module you will have a grounded understanding of how festivals work as curatorial spaces, with knowledge of the history of film festivals.