Political pressure on film and television festivals emerged as a defining theme of a panel discussion Monday at the Lumière Summit in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, with Séries Mania general director Laurence Herszberg issuing the session’s most direct call for protection of programming autonomy. The panel, titled “Easy to Criticize, Impossible to Replace: Rethinking the Festival” and moderated by Rajendra Roy, chief curator of film at MoMA, brought together festival chiefs from Berlin, Cannes, Toronto, San Sebastián, Annecy, Mumbai, Durban, the Red Sea and South by Southwest. It covered three areas: audiences and community, how festivals relate to the media, and the mounting economic and political strains on festival leadership.
Herszberg was direct on the political pressure facing her and her peers. Cameron Bailey, chief executive of the Toronto Film Festival, which launches its first formal market this year, echoed the sentiment. He recalled joining TIFF as a programmer in 1990, “at a time when festivals felt like a completely free and open space.” Bailey pointed to TIFF’s Next Wave youth program – now 15 years old – as a long-term investment in building young audiences.
On the rationale for TIFF’s new market, Bailey said: “The market is also part of that ecosystem – I mean, a terrible way to put it would be that it’s the fertilizer of the ecosystem, but really, it’s what feeds” a constant supply of ambitious films. Berlinale festival director Tricia Tuttle, whose event drew 450,000 admissions last year, and was at the eye of a political storm, put audience development at the center of her contribution. Cannes president Iris Knobloch pointed to the breadth of her festival’s annual gathering – 40,000 accredited participants from 140 countries, with over 4,000 journalists in attendance.
Faisal Baltyuor, chief executive of the Red Sea Film Foundation, said his organization’s last edition sold out every screening. On the festival-press relationship, Peter Debruge – now director of the South by Southwest Film & TV Festival after a 20-year tenure at Variety, the last ten as chief critic – put the case for studio films serving discovery. Maialen Beloki, deputy director of San Sebastián, pointed to shrinking press resources as a structural problem.
She added that the race to break news online carries its own cost. Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, founding director of the Film Heritage Foundation and director of the MAMI Festival in Mumbai, said his screenings of restored films regularly attract between 1,000 and 1,400 people and that all MAMI events are free of charge. He described the MAMI Independent outreach initiative that partnered with a major cinema chain to bring independent films to cities across India ahead of the festival proper.
Mickaël Marin, from the Annecy Animation Film Festival, said that since his appointment in 2018 he has worked to open Annecy to general audiences beyond its traditional professional base, including through a permanent exhibition space that opened last June. Magdalene Reddy, director of the Durban FilmMart Institute, said the core challenge in Africa is not finding audiences but reaching them in the absence of sufficient cinema infrastructure. When moderator Roy closed the session by asking whether festivals could survive without the American industry – demanding a yes or no – Reddy was the only panelist to answer no, while noting that her focus remains squarely on African content.
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