Recently at the International Film Festival Summit in Austin, San Francisco Film Society Executive Director Ted Hope questioned the legitimacy of film festivals in a world saturated with film.
We live in the time of grand abundance of content, total access to content and rampant distraction from content. Fifty thousand feature films are generated worldwide on an annual basis. America will remain the top consumption market in the world for at least another year, and it’s thought we, at best, consume between 500-600 titles a year – basically, only 1% of the world’s supply. It will take us an entire century to look at this year’s supply of film. And next year we will still have the other 49,500 we didn’t get to this year. And yet good movies don’t get widely seen. Do we really need any new movies?
Of course, we need new movies! You might as well say we don’t need any more songs or poems or dreams.
Fifty-six years ago the San Francisco International FIlm Festival launched, the first in America. Today there are thousands. Hope continues:
Seven years ago, the biggest film festival in the world launched, offering the greatest degree of community participation and media democracy yet implemented:YouTube. Four billion videos per day are streamed. Quality may be an issue, but they filled a need we seemingly missed. Five years ago, cable VOD platforms offered 50 or so new films a month; today we get thousands. And still 27 films a week still open in NYC. San Francisco and the Bay Area now host over 80 film festivals throughout the year. How do we ensure that film festivals truly matter in this over-saturated environment of infinite options?
A very good question.
It seems film festivals are facing the same issues that plague filmmakers: how to remain relevant in a world where paradoxically standards are rising and falling at the same time and where competition is fierce and fewer and fewer make it to the top.
My take is that change is inevitable.
Old methods will hang on (with a few winners getting larger and larger). In the meantime, the vanguard of filmmakers will explore new methods of funding and distributing their work. (This might be crowd funding and theatre screenings on demand — ToD.)
And one day the remnants of the industry will catch up and formalize a new economic model.