Stakeholders & Independent Film Festivals

May 8, 2023 Dennis D. McDonald

Recently my wife and I were suprised to receive an email from director Michael Moore announcing the shutdown, after 20 years, of the Traverse City Film Festival. Our attendance at that festival years ago was what got us interested in volunteering for the Alexandria Film Festival here in Virginia.

While the Alexandria Film Festival, now in its 17th year, has never expanded to the size and reach of the Traverse City event, it has continued operating through a combination of community and donor support, volunteer effort, and — most importantly — the ability to consistently attract a diverse and exciting selection of independent films and filmmakers.

We struggled through the pandemic as did all public arts venues. Last November saw our return to an in person festival. We have also sponsored successful standalone screenings outside the scaffolding provided by our annual November event, including the screening of the wine-related documentary Living Wine at the Alexandria Patagonia store and the local premier of the exemplary documentary Remember This at Alexandria’s historic Lyceum.

There’s a lot or work involved in putting on a festival every year like this. We have a core of volunteers who love movies, we have access to excellent local facilities (Alexandria itself is a terrific destination), we consistently receive valuable grant support, and we have a good reputation among independent filmmakers.

Still, we exist in a highly competitive media environment where both occasional and hard-core movie lovers have a LOT of competing choices for accessing both feature length and short films that interest them.

How do we stand out from the crowd? More specifically, as a volunteer effort, how do we:

Continue to attract high quality film submissions from independent filmmakers?
Continue to attract local audiences for in-person events?

Festival activities are greatly driven by seeing independent films as a way to connect these two groups. As a volunteer run nonprofit we are restricted in how much we can do in terms of labor hours; after all, most of us have day jobs, too. We have been active in a variety of outreach efforts including print and radio advertising, social media (e.g., Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook), regular publishing of an emailed newsletter, press releases for local and national media, and ongoing contacts with industry organizations such as Abramorama and Festival Scope Pro.

Making connections between festival audiences and filmmakers has always been a challenge. Each film selected for festival screening potentially has a different audience that may not overlap 100% with other festival films. Reasonable question to address are:

What are the groups we should consider as “stakeholders” in film festival planning?
What are their interests regarding a local film festival like ours?

With 17 years of experience in festival operations, some of us of course have an understanding of who these stakeholders are. As an experiment I recruited OpenAI’s GPT-4 to help drill down into the question of film festival stakeholder identification. My colleague Michael Kaplan and I have been investigating these tools in another setting (Orchestrating AI Large Language Model Tools to Enhance Project Management Document Creation) so I created a question and submitted it to GPT-4 to test out my curiosity:

What are the categories of people most interested in film festivals that screen independent films?

This is what GPT-4 said in response:

People most interested in film festivals that screen independent films often come from diverse backgrounds, but they tend to fall into several key categories:

Independent filmmakers: These artists are often looking for platforms to showcase their work, network with others in the industry, and gain exposure, recognition, and potential distribution deals.
Film enthusiasts and cinephiles: These individuals have a strong passion for cinema, especially independent and arthouse films that deviate from mainstream fare. They enjoy discovering new talent, engaging with thought-provoking content, and participating in the film community.
Film critics and journalists: Professionals who write about and review films are always on the lookout for new and innovative content to cover. Independent film festivals provide them with fresh material and help them stay informed about emerging trends and talents in the industry.
Industry professionals and executives: Film festivals are networking opportunities for producers, distributors, agents, and other industry insiders. They attend these events to scout for new talent, projects, and potential business partnerships.
Film students and aspiring filmmakers: Those pursuing a career in film often attend festivals to learn about the craft, network with like-minded individuals, and gain inspiration from the works of others.
Local communities and cultural organizations: Independent film festivals often attract those who are interested in promoting and celebrating the cultural diversity of their region or country. They may be involved in organizing, sponsoring, or attending these events to support local talent and enrich the cultural landscape.
Activists and social issue advocates: Many independent films tackle pressing social, political, and environmental issues. People who are passionate about these topics are drawn to film festivals that highlight such content and foster discussion and awareness.

Conceivably, any film selected for screening in a film festival can — in theory at least — spawn a communication plan that uses a list like the above to help identify individuals, groups, associations, organizations, and media that might be contacted or recruited to promote interest in a film.

As Michael Kaplan and I have found in our other generative AI research, the question then becomes “what next?” How do we examine each of these categories from the perspective of people that might have some interest in the Alexandria Film Festival?

When we are looking at reviewing, selecting, or promoting an individual film or group of films, we do need to get specific both in terms of (a) the time and resources as volunteers we can bring to bear on communicating with such stakeholders, and (b) how extensive we want the size and variety of each stakeholder group to be.

The following are some relevant questions that might be addressed to become more specific. Such questions can be asked about each film, each related group of films that might be shown together, or about the festival itself:

How do we identify independent filmmakers interested in submitting to our festival?
How do we define “film enthusiast”?
Which members of the media are most likely to listen to and pass along information about our films and our festival?
Are there film schools and associations that we need to develop ongoing relationships with?
How do we communicate with local nonprofits or community groups who are “cause-focused” as opposed to being “film-focused”?
How “geographic region focused” should we be in terms of filmmakers and audience members? In the past we’ve had participating filmmakers from all over the world while the majority of festival attendees are from the DC area and surrounding Maryland and Virginia.
What demographic, age, or other socioeconomic characteristics do we want to focus on in planning, communicating about, and managing the festival? For example, if we want to recruit “younger” audience members to come to the year-end festival, does it make sense to use tools like email and Facebook that skew older?

Getting back to the topic of the Traverse City Film Festival, I wonder how they approached the issue of stakeholder identification and communication? Had they just gotten too large and extended to manage given their dependence on local volunteers? Did local merchants respond positively to the week-long festival and its various film showing venues around Traverse City? Did they not succeed in sponsoring the wheeling and dealing of distribution rights that festivals like Sundance and Cannes emphasize? Or did Michael Moore just decide he wanted to focus on other things?

I don’t know the answers to these questions. Maybe in Traverse City they did face some of the same challenges that we regularly address here in Alexandria. The rise of video streaming as well as remote experience gained during the pandemic have both conditioned people to question traditional assumptions about the status quo around both work and leisure pursuits.

While my own lifelong interest in movies now accommodates a lot of at-home streaming, I don’t think that in-theater viewing will ever be replaced. This is reinforced whenever I see a film in a “real theater.” It has also been reinforced by the give and take at the Alexandria Film Festival’s post-screening Q&A sessions. There’s a connection between filmmaker and audience that takes place after a big-screen viewing that is impossible to replace with a disembodied Zoom session (which we tried during the pandemic). The challenge: figuring out how to best enable that experience while managing all the financial and logistical challenges associated with managing an independent film festival!