HFM Boat Sessions 2020: How Do Stories Shine in the Pandemic Age?

Steered by Hayet Benkara (Locarno Pro, IFFR, TIFF), a boatful of expert panel­lists told of their expe­ri­ences in navi­gating the murky waters of the pandemic during 2020. Hayet’s fellow crew members were Hannah Verboom (Cine tree), film­maker Déa Gjinovci, the Bristol Watershed’s Mark Cosgrove and Richard Pena, (director emer­itus, New York Film Festival) Hannah opened the conver­sa­tion to explain how her cineaste streaming plat­form rose to the pandemic chal­lenge. She described her company as a mission-driven plat­form, as a David within a Goliath country. But Covid ​“accel­er­ated us to do what we are set up to do”. She initially adjusted her program­ming online to offer up ​“hopeful” titles, and ​“we were able to make our service avail­able for every­body for the first weeks of Covid, because we really felt strongly that we wanted to do some­thing, that we wanted to give some­thing in a time when every­body suddenly had to stay home.” Numbers grew as the company solid­i­fied busi­ness rela­tion­ships with festi­vals such as Movies that Matter, and they also put online collec­tions from IDFA and IFFR and a small collec­tion of NFF. ​“For TVOD we have been looking espe­cially at how we can facil­i­tate the film festi­vals because we saw that a lot changed there. We have a beau­tiful collec­tion now with Movies that Matter, films about human rights. But for SVOD, our main core, we didn\‘t see that much differ­ence.” ​“Some­times we have campaigns…we try to use certain films, like I Am Not Your Negro when Black Lives Matter happened, together with the distrib­utor to make the movie for free. On social media it went viral and many thou­sands of people watched the film and there were so many discus­sions and conver­sa­tions because of that film.” ​“I think the audi­ence is really hungry to watch these stories,” she added. Film­maker Déa Gjinovci spoke of her disap­point­ment in there being no live world première for her debut feature docu­men­tary Wake Up On Mars, selected for Tribeca and Visions du Reel, among other festi­vals. ​“It was quite devas­tating because every­thing happened so fast,” she says, after a long period of hard work for which she received no money, making a lot of sacri­fices, and then no live première. ​“I needed this catharsis, this moment to have with my crew, with the char­ac­ters of the film, and the film to really have a sense of comple­tion and to see it more as a ritual to say, ​‘now the film is done and it is going into the universe and will have its life’. We [normally] have this cere­mony that is very impor­tant.” She added: ​“There are sublim­inal moments in a filmmaker’s life where you can always imagine your first big festival or your first big screening and not to have that was very diffi­cult.” She voiced her dissat­is­fac­tion with some festi­vals which didn\‘t offer much by way of feed­back, whether in terms of online viewing numbers, feed­back or even the date of screening. ​“It is weird to see a work of art you have created, and not being able at all to engage with it and the reac­tions of the audi­ence.” But not so Visions du Reel. ​“Visions was good because we pre-recorded a Q & A. They gave us stats at the end telling us how many people watched the film. It was crazy. In 24 hours in Switzer­land there were 4000 people who watched the film. That would never happen in a phys­ical edition of Visions du Reel.” Richard Pena was asked how, in these times of pandemic, festi­vals can keep the audi­ence contin­u­ally engaged with the films they select. ​“I used say to my colleagues that what we present at the Lincoln Centre is ​‘movies plus’. In other words, if it’s just movies then you are competing even now more with plat­forms, people having enor­mous home systems, so you have to give people more than movies…People want more of an expe­ri­ence than that. So of course it starts with in-person dialogue with film­makers, or experts or with panels.” He pointed out how, as a example. when program­ming an African season they would organise a fashion a fashion show, as there are a lot of African designers in New York. He continued: ​“Increas­ingly, program­mers now have to think, what are we doing with this group after the screening, as our job as program­mers doesn\‘t end just because the film is over. A new phase begins, and maybe the pandemic has made that audi­ence even more avail­able… So the work of the programmer has evolved to really think of that post-screening time as a time of active inter­ven­tion.” Mark Cosgrove of the Water­shed cinema and arts complex in Bristol discussed the past six months as much within a polit­ical frame­work as an epidemi­o­log­ical one. ​“The cinema that I have been working in, inde­pen­dent cinema, and the work that I do at the Water­shed, the film is part of a conver­sa­tion, part of a discus­sion, it does not come out of nowhere. Films come out of the shared culture that we live in, and audi­ences want to engage in more than just watching the film,” he said. He cited the example of Steve McQueen’s 12 Years A Slave. ​“Bristol was involved in the slave trade. We just recently toppled the statue of a slave trader. When you show a film like that in a city like Bristol, you can’t just show it. People want to discuss what that means. We did a whole lot of events with black organ­i­sa­tions in Bristol. We worked very closely with a group called Come the Revo­lu­tion which is a black curating group, and we set up formal and informal ways that [the film] could be engaged with, and there were some of the most powerful conver­sa­tions that that film started.” ​“The film was a major focal point, but actu­ally one of the most impor­tant spaces was our café bar,” he added. ​“I cannot reit­erate how impor­tant a social space is for the pre- and post‑, and its actu­ally that point when the meaning of the film, and I am talking about when meaning becomes mean­ingful, when those conver­sa­tions happen.” On the subject of Covid, Mark stressed how ​“we no longer existed.. An exis­ten­tial crisis happened in the sense that for the first time in 100 years cinema didn’t exist… We thought we would close for 6 weeks… but then it was obvious it was more serious.” He points out that he was very quickly approached by the online plat­form MUBI to offer online subscrip­tions. ​“They are a bril­liant supporter of cinema and of film culture in its broadest sense, so we set up a free subscrip­tion for our members. We worked with the BFI to have a programme on their player, and then we started doing virtual cinema.” ​“And now as we have reopened, what I am real­ising is that the tools that were talked about in terms of online, that Covid has driven expo­nen­tially the change that digital promised, which is that it’s all avail­able, it’s all there. But there is so much [content] now that I think people still want a sense of cura­tion, a sense of trusted engage­ment. ​‘Who are the voices?’ What is it’ What is trying to be said?” ​“We screened a number of films virtu­ally like Clemency and Coup 53, and we have done box office splits with these, and I know that is going to become part of the vocab­u­lary of film exhi­bi­tion in cinema and online, and we will use these tools as we are at the moment as we go forward. But I still firmly believe that festi­vals are really the heart­beat of the inter­na­tional film world. Some­thing happens at film festi­vals which is really impor­tant, and impor­tant for film in general.” Richard added on main­stream exhi­bi­tion: ​“I think the main­stream commer­cial world is going through a really radical change. They are ulti­mately only inter­ested in the money, and if they can get the money through online plat­forms then they don\‘t need the theatrical. The demise of the movie theatre? The pandemic has speeded this up [and] I wonder if they will re-open. They’re not a profit point. Very few films make money and the recent failure of Tenet should serve as a warning.” He also touched on the global versus local ques­tion, citing the example in Brooklyn of micro-cinemas popping up to show local films. ​“Maybe more atten­tion will be placed on local product,” he said. The panel­lists offered up some final words before disem­barking from the film boat. Déa expressed how ​“there are still a few months left of 2020, so instead of seeing it in a nega­tive light, let’s cele­brate as the films of 2020 seem more as a triumph.” Mark under­lined how ​“film and film­making isn’t going away… and we are getting audi­ences that want to come back and see films. From my own side it’s about making sure we get through this pandemic as a busi­ness. I have seen three film­makers locally already who have made their first features, and I want to help them get their films onto the screen. It will be a hybrid but I think that is now going to be part of the vocab­u­lary of cinema going forward.” Richard observed that ​“even­tu­ally things will return — but not to normal, if we mean by normal what used to exist. Some things I think are changing and I think what we have to do is to prepare ourselves to make sure that those changes are to the advan­tage of the inde­pen­dent film commu­nity, the world film commu­nity, but we’re not going back to where it was. That really is for me some­thing that is beyond repair, and it’s because the world has changed.” For Hannah, there were three issues. ​“We are in the world cinema, not commer­cial, so we really need to work together …we need to be inno­v­a­tive, we need to be so on top of things because it is really tough busi­ness-wise, even for an online plat­form we have already seen a small decrease because people are looking at their member­ships and their fees so busi­ness wise we need to be really clever.” Secondly, she under­lined cura­tion to satisfy curious and smart, and thirdly we need to think of the films as campaigns. ​“How is this film rele­vant? Keep blazing a conversation.”