Posted on March 26, 2019
Meeting Richard Sowada and Thoughts on Film Spa (2015, Miroslav Janek)
Festival Experience Studio blog post #2
So, for our first week of this studio, we were very lucky to meet Richard Sowada, an incredible Festival Director with so much wisdom to share. Some of the key points I took away from his lecture was the extreme passion that these film enthusiasts have for film culture, so much that they put an immense amount of effort and ingenuity into creating these huge festivals for the whole community to enjoy. Sowada began with such humble beginnings, possessing the film reels and calling in for screenings, only to get rejected countless times. He definitely had a thick skin and lots of determination, which is a trait I’m slowly but surely developing through the years as a media practitioner. What I found particularly fascinating and indeed a valuable learning experience was Sowada’s idea to screen films at local pubs. An easy way to bring in an audience, and from this experience, he explained how he made sure to observe and work with the viewers, understand what they liked and disliked. I could clearly see Sowada’s incredible connection and understanding of audience, and I believe that this key skill of his – among many other professional qualities – is what made him the successful Film Director he is today. This particular element has become one of the key principles that I’ve been extracting and focusing on the readings and lectures in the past couple of weeks.
The week after, we watched Film Spa (2015, Miroslav Janek), a documentary film that celebrates the journey of the Karlovy Vary Internation Film Festival (KVIFF) which was founded in 1946. The film illustrates the tensions and effects of the ruling government regime over the festival, particular how the decisions of whatever ruling government at the time affected what films were screened, and what films were censored. I am no way near an expert in the politics of Czech Republic, but the key point that I was able to take away from the film was the absolute importance of the audience, which connects with Sowada’s lecture, as well as the readings. In particular, Mark Peranson’s article, “First You Get the Power, Then You Get the Money: Two Models of Film Festivals“, he highlights two types of film festivals that “coexist in an essentially core-periphery relationship”: the business festival, and the audience festival. What Peranson expresses is that these two models, although contrasting, exist together in a dialectical climate that ultimately creates film festivals with varying degrees of profitability and scale. The similarities that I understood with Sowada’s lecture and Film Spa is that to have a successful film festival, the organizers need to understand how to provide for the audience and then utilize the audiences’ needs to generate sales. Hence, Peranson further dissects the necessity of sales agents for festivals. Thus, reflecting back over the years of the KVIFF, fundamentally it is having a relationship with the audience, the filmmakers and the festival directors that create an enjoyable and successful festival. And without getting too much into the politics, when one decides to censor and control the distribution of films without taking into consideration the voice of the public, that is what will sabotage the essence of a film festival.
References:
Mark Peranson, “First You Get the Power, Then You Get the Money: Two Models of Film Festivals (Links to an external site.)“, Cinéaste, 1 July 2008, Vol.33(3), pp. 37-43.