Walking into class Friday morning of week 8 (not so punctually), Mark Cousins’ Film Festival Form: A Manifesto (2012) was up on the screen, and Cerise said something along the lines of “Amy, you seem like someone who likes a manifesto,” to which I laughed and recalled something I disagreed with in the reading about The Smiths (disbanded 80s band, not the potato chips) and feelings of excitement being paired together. While I said that in efforts to forget my high school Smiths phase, Cousins makes an interesting point, noting “the daring of the word and music cadences and ironies” (2012) in ‘There is a Light that Never Goes Out’ (1986). He draws connections from the excitement in its daringness, to “form,” which he suggests film festivals are lacking, many using “the same techniques” (2012).
How can festivals be daring in their form and shaken “out of this torpor [?]” Cousins writes that “we should start thinking of them as narratives.” This take on film festivals is quite beautiful, a way of recounting the event as a story. They’re a platform for stories to be told, by a festival team of “storytellers” (2012). To tell these stories to an audience though, we need to let people know about DIFF, as the public aren’t yet aware of our upcoming event. Having just created an Instagram page in week 7 with followers slowly but promisingly creeping in, it’s important that we “prepare a clear set of information to present to the media” (Rambousková B, 2015). Rambouskovà outlines a list of this information to be presented, which is currently still very much a work in progress for DIFF’s first edition. However, we’ve ticked two very important boxes – “an exact title of the festival” and “the aim of the festival” (2015). Maya and I recently wrote up a mission statement, which will hopefully narrow down the film selection for the programme and influence what route the programming team takes with the content we choose to showcase.
References
Cousins M (2012) Film Festival Form: A Manifesto
Rambousková B (2015) ‘How to Successfully Promote Your Festival’ in Setting Up a Human Rights Film Festival, vol. 2, Human Rights Film Network, Prague, pp. 97-114.