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Film Festival Secrets: An Interview with Chris Holland

Published on September 23, 2009

by Jolene Pinder with contributions by Eleni Chappen & Will Swartz

The last year has seen the arrival of two new and important resources for every documentary filmmaker’s bookshelf (or cache of PDFs as the case may be)—Film Festival Secrets: A Handbook for Independent Filmmakers by Chris Holland and Fans, Friends and Followers: Building an Audience and a Creative Career in the Digital Age by Scott Kirsner. These books both offer an arsenal of practical tips and an impressive dose of prescient vision about the state of independent distribution and the future of audience cultivation. This is the first in a two-part MediaRights.org series interviewing the authors.

Film Festival Secrets

Released last October, Chris Holland’s Film Festival Secrets is an insightful step-by-step guide for navigating a successful run on the festival circuit. The book is available for purchase in print; you can read it online; or download a free PDF (donations are encouraged—and surely you’ll be so grateful for this resource that you won’t be able to resist making a contribution!). You can also follow Chris’ Film Festival Secrets blog for updated content on the festival scene.

How did you decide to write Film Festival Secrets: A Handbook for Independent Filmmakers?

I was an intern at the Austin Film Festival. I say intern but I was more like a full-time volunteer. While I was stuffing envelopes and doing whatever they asked me to do, I was listening to the programming department answer phone calls from filmmakers and they were answering the same questions over and over again: “Do I need a label on my DVD?” “What should be on the case?”—just standard sort of submissions questions.

I thought to myself, somebody should put this information down somewhere so [the film festival staff] doesn’t have to answer these questions a zillion times. Two years later, when the opportunity came to take a chunk of time and use all the notes I had collected to write a book, I took advantage of it. It took about four times as long as I thought it was going to, but I’m really happy with what came out.

What are some of the most common mistakes filmmakers make in developing a festival strategy?

I think the single biggest mistake filmmakers make is that they start to submit to festivals without knowing what they want from the festival circuit, or why they’re submitting. It’s important to know what’s out there, what the ramifications are of playing one festival versus another festival and just knowing why you’re doing it in the first place. You made a movie—what are your goals for that film?

Are there any festivals you consider to be the best-kept secrets in the festival world?

You’re asking me to make Sophie’s Choice here. For every person I make happy here, I’m going to make four people unhappy because I didn’t mention their festival. For everybody reading who I don’t mention, I love you just as much.

Let me start with some of the film festivals I’ve been to recently. The Atlanta Film Festival, I think, is a real up-and-comer. They’re in a major metro, but it’s not the kind of major metro that is really into independent film; it’s a very different southern audience. So, on one hand, they really struggle to find acceptance within their city, but on the other hand, [the festival staff] is just so gung-ho about what they do and so infectious about the people they bring in. I kind of think of it as being in the same position SXSW might have been in ten years ago when it was sort of an upstart and just starting to get really cool.

On a smaller scale, I had the opportunity to go to Oxford, Mississippi, and Little Rock, Arkansas. The community support around those festivals is just amazing. You couldn’t go anywhere in either of those towns without seeing flyers for their festival, and since they’re both relatively small towns, people would ask, “Oh, are you here for the film festival?” They were really interested. When a community really supports a festival—and not just by being enthusiastic about it, but by supporting it financially with services, too—it really shows.

And I’ll mention one more that’s a larger festival that I think has a good reputation but not everybody thinks of it right off-the-bat, and that’s the Independent Film Festival of Boston (IFFB). Filmmakers generally don’t know a lot about how film festivals work and who gets paid and who doesn’t. Generally, there’s somebody on a film festival staff getting paid, even if it’s just the Execuive Director. None of the IFFB staff take a salary. And I think it’s this dedication that’s just amazing, and it really shows in their festival and it shows in the way that the people of Boston come out for it. If it’s not at the top of your list going in, it should come to your attention as one of the festivals that’s really up-and-coming.

One thing I really liked about Film Festival Secrets is that you acknowledge the differences in festival and distribution strategies for short films. I think it’s an important distinction to make because it seems like the appetite for short documentaries is really growing. At the same time, the distribution landscape is still really in flux.

Do you have any predictions for the future of short-format work? Are filmmakers going to be able to monetize this work so they can keep making it?

You know, I don’t see it changing that much, quite honestly, because there’s a lot of content—a lot of short film content—available for free online. And people are used to consuming it that way, and so when you give them a choice to pay 99 cents for this short over here, or to watch this one for free, they’re going to go for free every time. It would be nice if this were different, but I think shorts are going to continue to serve the function as a training ground, a calling card. Maybe that will change with webisodes. I think there are people who have turned the short form into a serial story that didn’t really exist before, like now you can do your own sort of serial films that weren’t sustainable in the pre-Internet time. I think those people stand to make a lot of money, especially if they’re smart about merchandising.

Unfortunately, with a few exceptions, most shorts makers are people who are just learning the craft. Whether they make any money on it or not is maybe beside the point. Because is that really the goal of making a short film? Or is it to prove that you can do something to express yourself artistically, to get a job, whatever it is. The whole idea of monetizing short films, while it’s exciting to think that it might happen, is really kind of beside the point.

I was wondering if you could talk about the traits you see in documentary filmmakers who are really savvy about getting their work out into the world and promoting their films.

Sure, well there’s always the obvious, and that’s don’t be a “tool.” It helps to be friendly. A friend of mine and documentary filmmaker, PJ Raval, said to me a couple months ago, “You can be a jerk and still get your movie made, but it’s going to cost you three times as much.”

Chris Holland

It also helps to have the accoutrement of the profession. Have a postcard, have a business card, have some screeners on-hand. Be prepared. When you show up at your festival screenings, there are going to be serious prospects who may be interested in your film, even if you never really thought about that, and be prepared to accommodate them. There’s taking yourself seriously and there’s taking yourself too seriously. You don’t need a giant one-sheet or anything like that, but you do need to be prepared and you need to have a website and you need to have all the things that people say you need. You don’t need to be on Twitter 24/7. You don’t need to have eight different Facebook profiles for the character in your movie, but be aware that there are certain things that are out there that are standards and you should adhere to them creatively.

Given the rise of online film festivals, like From Here to Awesome or Babelgum Online Film Festival : How do you see online festivals changing the festival landscape in any way and how should filmmakers think about these emerging distribution outlets?

The simple fact is that you can over-expose your film through putting it online, but depending on what your goal is, that may not be a bad thing. There is no better way to get people to see your movie than to put it online, because you just give so many more people access. But if you’re looking to sell 5,000 DVDs of that, then maybe putting it online for free isn’t the best way to go.

I’m personally not a huge fan of the online film festival concept because for me, the whole point of a festival is that it’s a party, and that we all go into the same room and watch the same thing at the same time, and we laugh together and talk about it afterwards, and we go have free drinks at the bar afterwards. To me, that’s a festival. But I do recognize that there is a value in helping filmmakers get exposure for their work by drawing film-lovers to a central place on the web and having work exhibited there.

If you’re a filmmaker right now, you have to be careful about where you put your film online and where you don’t and when you do it and at what stage of your career—because there are festivals that simply won’t play your film after it’s been online, for any reason, for any length of time. This is sad, because I think, no matter how many people see it online, there is only some small fraction of those who are rabidly consuming these films online, and the rest of them want to sit in a theater and watch it there.

Can you talk a little bit about your work with B-Side and what B-Side is trying to do in the independent film community?

B-Side is trying to prove that if you ask the audience what it wants to see, that the audience will actually respond when you make it available to them. Our work with film festivals is all geared towards helping the festivals run a better event while allowing us to collect data from the audience about what films they like at those festivals. So, we run a website that plugs into the larger festival website and presents each film in the festival on its own page, where the filmmaker can take a direct hand in marketing their film at that festival. They can upload trailers, they can upload stills, they can have a blog on the festival property, so the festival doesn’t have to push people away from their festival site in order to bring sort of a full-featured “this is what this film is about” to the festival. And the audience gets to not only look at all this information, but can also create a calendar of the films they want to see. We introduced a new feature where you can sort of plug in the films you want to see and hit a button and the site will generate the optimal schedule.

Is there anything else you’d like to say about non-fiction films on the festival circuit or any trends you see in documentary distribution?

When I was at the Little Rock festival I saw Phil Donahue speak. He’s made an amazing film, Body of War, and just cannot get it distributed because it’s an Iraqumentary, and the American public has had it up to here with Iraqumentaries. But he’s still optimistic enough to say that he thinks that documentary films are going to “fill the big black void left by corporate media,” that’s how he put it. He’s right, you know. Newspapers are dying, and television news is all about which celebrity died today. I think it’s really going to be up to [documentary filmmakers] who care about the stories they’re telling, whether they’re getting paid or not, to tell those stories, and to do the journalism, whether you call it that or not, that needs to be done. It’s some big shoes to fill, and I’m excited to see where that goes.

Chris Holland has been writing about movies, film festivals, and indie film since 1991. He co-founded Stomp Tokyo, a film review web site described by the New York Times as “a place to indulge one’s questionable cinematic taste.” Chris entered the festival scene in 2005, first by volunteering with the Austin Film Festival and then as the festival’s Director of Marketing. He currently works as the Director of Festival Operations at B-Side. B-Side prides itself on being at the forefront of progressive distribution, helping filmmakers reach their audiences in defiance of the old ways of thinking.

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Enjoyed the article Q&A very much. As a volunteer film festival director (Martha’s Vineyard International Film Festival) I have read Chris’s book and found it to be very informative. Another excellent book on subject is “The Ultimate Film Festival Survival Guide” by Chris Gore.
thanks
Richard

Posted on 2009 10 26 by Richard Paradise