Today, I want to talk about the guest lecture by Mia Falstein-Rush, which I thought was incredibly helpful and insightful. There were quite a few things that I could take away from her talk, and I’m eager to discuss some of them

For instance, her tips on conducting business and presenting your festival were just on point. The way you communicate through phone calls and emails creates a certain image for your entire festival and it’s certainly something to be mindful of. I came across an article the other day, and I think it speaks about a very similar thing. It’s about you being a brand of your own, and all of your actions and ongoing communications being ‘advertisements’, so to say. A sloppy and disrespectful email, as Mia was saying, is just like a really bad PR and can damage yours and your festival’s reputation. This article really ties with what Mia was saying and goes a little deeper into branding, marketing and business perspectives, so I would highly recommend giving it a read. It’s obviously very useful for a professional career, but also for personal life as well.

https://www.fastcompany.com/28905/brand-called-you

One topic that Mia briefly raised during her speech spoke to me in particular. I’ll attempt to summarise and paraphrase it from memory: even though it’s important to stay diverse and inclusive, you can’t base your choices on political correctness only, e.g. the submission has to be actually good for you to screen it. The issue of diversity and political correctness both fascinate and terrify me, especially since I am quite new to this Western world debate. In Mother Russia things are easier: you say what you have to say and you do what you need to do, and if it happens to offend someone… well, that’s just unfortunate. I am not a strongly opinionated person at all, and I try to keep my mind open at all times, so this question Mia raised really interested me. Should we, first of all, strive for quality or for inclusiveness? Should we include someone whose work doesn’t deserve to be included just to stay politically sensitive, or should we let good old natural selection work? Because these two contradict each other more often than not. Even the promotional video Mia showed for her Seen&Heard festival, all those statistics on how there are very few women in the industry… Any chance it’s because women are simply not that good at filmmaking? In the world of capitalism and the free market, the invisible hand always brings the skilled ones to success. In simpler words, a good filmmaker, whose films make good money, won’t ever have a problem of finding a job. I am in no way claiming that that’s the case and I am just trying to explore the topic and its different opinions. But because I am a strong believer in the modern capitalist ‘natural selection’, this question does seem elusive to me.

My initial question “what do we prioritise when choosing films for screening” won’t be answered today. Probably not tomorrow either, and the chances are, it’s not gonna be answered any time soon. And it’s not a bad thing, because that’s how we learn and how we grow.