DECEMBER 2006: It All Ends Up On The 'Net...And Other Thoughts
Although our Open Call process will not conclude for another week or so, we are well into our review and program selection process for the 2007 Festival. In truth, some of us have been viewing and tracking possible offerings for VC FILMFEST since last winter, even as we were still locking down the program for the 2006 Film Festival. The longer I've been on the job here, that fact has become more and more of a reality. Although our organizing team has been operating on a 15-to-18 month organizing schedule for a number of years, it really didn't hit home until Leslie Ito, our Executive Director, and I sat down at a West L.A. eatery to plan out fundraising strategies for bringing back the prolific Malaysian filmmaker Amir Muhammad to the 2006 Festival.
That meeting took place in September 2004 -- nearly two full years before Amir's planned return visit. Evidently, the planning consumes our waking hours, but the payoff -- the U.S. Premiere screening of his controversial road documentary THE LAST COMMUNIST and a specially-curated program of new digital shorts -- was well worth it.
These days, I'm sitting in our office and pre-screening feature-length possibilities for the Festival and preparing them for viewing by our program committee. The ones I don't finish, I take them home to watch. Subjecting our committee to as many as seventy feature-length narrative and non-fiction selections to view by Academy Awards weekend in February may be sadistic to some, but that comes with the territory. This workload doesn't include the dozens and dozens and dozens of features I view at both foreign and domestic film festivals in the year prior to our event; and it doesn't include the many other films by Asian Pacific Americans that me, Leslie, and our co-director David Magdael are obliged to view in various stages of incompleteness (think: temp music, unmixed audio tracks, unedited or incomplete scenes), all to identify those special gems, the ones that will drive Festival Week audiences to the theaters again and again to see how the latest feature or exceptional short film will top the ones they saw the day before. So I sit in a darkened office at Visual Communications, viewing hours upon hours of work, all to help our programmers select the most diverse and unique line-up of works that we can offer for folks visiting the Festival next May.
A bit of a digression: the other weekend, I found myself multi-tasking again in front of the television when "Saturday Night Live" came on. This particular weekend, singer Justin Timberlake (the one who dumped Britney, presumably to bring sexy back to somewhere) starred in a hilarious mock-music video with one of SNL's regular cast members, Adam Sandberg. The nominally Christmas-themed ditty, "Dick in a Box," essayed what women can expect from blued-eyed wannabe soulsters who ape their moves from outmoded boy-bands and gain inspiration for their lyrics from STUFF and MAD magazines. I had a good laugh at the conceit of gift-wrapping one's machinery in a box stuck onto the front of your pants for the benefit of that special someone, but I'll be damned -- someone posted the SNL segment on YouTube, and it's blowing up! As I write this, that music video is the most-watched movie on YouTube this week. I admit, that bit was funny, but its presence on the internet less than a week after its premiere points once again to the breaking down of walls between the local cinemas and, in this case, the television. Certainly, a new kind of viewing community has emerged in this age of online movies and Podcasting, but is it communal? Is it the sort of community that can interact with one another in the flesh? Is that not too much to ask? I'll be glad when I can meet with our program committee again -- I'd like to know once again what they think of whatever I throw at them. As a willing, captive audience, and not a virtual one.
Back to programming: while I've yet to finish my viewings, I've already screened, by my estimation, well over a hundred feature-length works, and by the time I lock our program, that number will probably top two humdred. That doesn't sound so impressive when I factor in the ones that either aren't programmable for us, not suitable, or just plain bad. Already though, distinct thematic threads are emerging, and ones that we've noted in last year's Festival program have asserted themselves. I'll write about some of those threads next time. It's early, I know, but things are beginning to look promising...
posted by Abraham Ferrer @ 4:05 AM
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