The London film festival has just celebrated its 50th year. The Edinburgh international film festival was 60 this summer. Venice turned 63. Cannes is 60 in May. The film festival regulation body, FIAPF (Fédération Internationale des Associations de Producteurs de Film), reckons there are 700 of them in total; the New York Times claims over 1,000. The number of festivals has rocketed in the last decade.
Venice, Edinburgh, Cannes and London are right to celebrate their longevity. But as the elite of the festival circuit clink champagne glasses, it would be surprising if their smiles weren't a little strained. Despite their glamour and ubiquity, festivals are in crisis. There are just too many of them, and they are too political and colluding.
At least 3,000 films are made each year. Film festivals are the shop windows for such production—visible and glamorous, but also powerless in that they (mostly) only respond to it. Since only around 150 of the 3,000 films are of real artistic merit, the thousand shop windows have to fight tooth and claw to showcase the best. When I was director of Edinburgh, I frequently locked horns with the then director of London. Cannes tends its relationship with Pedro Almodóvar with great care, but if he doesn't win the Palme d'Or soon, might he switch allegiance to Venice? Venice has long been Woody Allen's festival of choice, but might Toronto be making approaches behind the scenes?
To make things worse, FIAPF operates a pointless A-list of the 12 festivals it thinks deserve top ranking: Berlin, Mar Del Plata (Argentina), Cannes, Shanghai, Moscow, Karlovy Vary (Czech Republic), Locarno, Montreal, Venice, San Sebastian, Tokyo and Cairo. The omissions are glaring—no Sundance, London, Rotterdam or Toronto. To qualify, each of the 12 must have a competition section containing at least 14 world premieres. So the A-listers alone have at least 168 slots for new films to fill, which means that in theory all 150 of the good movies get swallowed up.
That the film festival circuit is political with a big "P" isn't surprising. The Italian fascist government meddled with the programming at Venice way back in 1938; the interference led to the founding of Cannes the next year. In 1995 and 1996 a major start-up festival in Prague tried to replace Karlovy Vary (established in 1946 in the province of Bohemia) as the region's main film event, on the grounds that Karlovy Vary was tainted by its past as a showcase for Soviet cinema.
Such catfights are exacerbated by the amount of public money at stake. Few film festivals raise more than 20 per cent of their income from box office sales. Most of the funding comes from the public sector or sponsorship. Of the thousand or so festivals, a handful have budgets upwards of £10m, two of Britain's festivals cost over £1m, and the smallest are in the £10,000 bracket. If the average budget is, say, £400,000, then the total cost of the circuit is £400m. (This excludes the cost of trips by PRs, journalists and so on.) Perhaps 40 per cent of this £400,000 comes from the private sector, which leaves £160m from the public purse.
How is this spend justified? The festivals argue that they are net contributors to their local economies, that they raise the profile of their cities and that they develop audiences' taste for non-mainstream films. All true, but in the last decade, the first two reasons—economic and PR—have taken precedence. Film festivals have proliferated because economic development departments and tourist boards understand them.
The implications are significant. Festivals grew out of the film society movement of the 1920s. Their original purpose was, in the words of Venice director Marco Müller, to "reveal what the markets hide." I have argued before that the international film industry is boosted, as if by steroids, by Hollywood's massive advertising spend on its own product. The film festival circuit is, then, a counter market, itself boosted by an annual steroid injection of £240m. Piers Handling of the Toronto film festival called this counter-market an "alternative distribution network."
But is this how festivals now operate? When the latest Matrix film premiered at Cannes, as did The Da Vinci Code, it was clear that the festival was spending some of its (public) money to subsidise Hollywood publicity budgets. If that is what is needed to draw the world's media, which will then cover the alternative films on offer, then fine. But festivals are becoming too collusive, and seem to have forgotten their original raison d'être. As well as showing new films, festivals have always had retrospectives, masterclasses, tributes and so on. But why are so many of these about first world directors who are already part of the canon? Another Cocteau season? Another Bergman or Kurosawa retrospective? This conservative programming is the heart of the problem. African filmmakers, or the great Indian directors—with the exception of Satyajit Ray—don't get a look in.
If festivals are to justify their existence, they need to engage with the history of film in the broadest sense, not simply enjoy the glitter of the mainstream. Only then will they reveal what the market hides.
