Fair Laurels for Film Festivals

My friend Ramazan, one of the greatest film programmers I know, was super grateful to me after I shared his CV in this blog to help him find job opportunities. His reaction meant a lot to me, so I decided to continue supporting him by offering some advice on improving film festivals. Here are my points:

Fair Laurels for Film Festivals

• Publicly disclose all films that were submitted and evaluated for the competition.
• Clearly identify which selected films were submitted through official submission, recommended by someone, or discovered/invited directly by the festival programmers. Is it an Official Submission or an Official Invitation?
• Disclose which applicants paid submission fees, announce the total amount collected from these fees, and provide a detailed account of how these fees were spent.
• Disclose how much of each film was watched during the evaluation process. If you did not or could not watch all submissions, that is acceptable, just be transparent about it. Do not give the impression that you watched 10.000 films if you did not.
• Identify the pre-selectors before the application process begins and announce who selected/hired them and the criteria used. Filmmakers would like to know who will watch/evaluate their film. Avoid allowing an individual to serve on a selection committee for an extended period, especially if they simultaneously have similar roles within the industry. If this is the case, either remove them from the board or ask them to choose between the two positions. Mix festival programmers with other professionals receiving one-time offers, and pay/offer fair rates for their work.
• Announce the jury members before the submission process starts and provide details on who selected/invited the jury and the selection process. Always offer fair rates for their time and efforts. Focus on merit to identify them without considering “controlled and performative diversity” based on personal, politic and ethnic identity labels or backgrounds.
• Make all cash prizes the same value. Or, if the budget permits, distribute the whole fund equally among all the films in the competition. It will help the awards only serve as a matter of prestige or artistic appreciation rather than a financial benefit. Meanwhile, financial support for the films will remain active (if the pre-selection committee has already done its job well, this means that all the films in the competition deserve at least financial support).
• Allow the jury the right to withhold awards if they believe no film in the selection merits one. It will help to maintain high standards of artistic excellence. If an award with a cash prize is withheld, distribute the money equally among all selected films in the competition.
• Establish a star table based on the jury’s decisions and make it public.
• Set a maximum number of cash prizes a film can receive on the festival circuit. Exclude films that reach this limit from receiving additional cash prizes. This will help prevent the monopolization of cash awards worldwide. You can track it the same way you track premiere status. It is not hard to identify monopolies. Even if this is not feasible, at least take a stance. The films chosen by major festivals are sweeping up all the awards worldwide with this momentum. Don’t copy paste, make your own independent decisions.
• Remove restrictions related to the year of production and premiere status. Of course, selection committees can prioritize new films, but they also can choose an older film that was previously overlooked or has not received the recognition it deserves. This might be a motivating message for filmmakers: Don’t chase trends, make something good, and it might get noticed, even years later.
• Reduce the number of categories as much as possible. Art is not a medium where competitors need to be separated into weight classes like in wrestling or boxing. Films from different genres, styles, and formats can compete together. Actually this approach is more inclusive than dividing them into categories, as it allows, for example, a short film to compete alongside a big-budget feature film, which will make artistic depth the main criterion.
• Don’t rely on professionalism. There are many terrible films that meet all professional standards but waste the resources, waste the funds, waste the festival slots. Distribute the risk.
• A screenplay is not the story itself, it is a tool for making a film. So remove the Best Screenplay award if the jury doesn’t evaluate the written piece. If the intention is to honor the narrative, name it Best Story to focus on the storytelling aspect of the film. If the intention is to honor the writer, name it Best Screenwriter, but in this case, let the jury read the screenplay as it was used during production, and evaluate it based on how much it contributes to the final work.
• Always have technical categories like Sound Design and Cinematography. Recognize them as equally important as other award categories (while a film can be made without actors, it cannot exist without images or sound).
• When you give an honorary award, don’t just give it with a brief presentation. Name the works and roles specifically. Which films? Which roles? Tell us why they mattered, and what they gave us that lasts.
• Eliminate in-kind awards that consist of services. Since filmmakers who win those awards cannot choose whom they work with, they might not receive the quality of services they want. And sponsoring companies are often not motivated to provide the services after they have already advertised themselves through the awards.
• Share information about your sponsors and their backgrounds with the public. Explain their intentions for supporting the festival and any specific requests they have.
• Since sending individual rejection messages is not feasible, avoid making them sound too personalized or empathetic, because the same message goes out to thousands of people and can feel very insincere or even have the opposite effect. A straightforward notification will suffice if you are already transparent in the selection process.

Ramazan is Not Guilty ♡

I know that my dear friend Ramazan is not responsible for these issues alone. And our world is not just a world of regulations, but a world of opinions, perceptions, perspectives, tastes, sensitivities, and feelings. So, what drives me is not just solving these issues but also exposing the setup that we have constructed. I wrote these suggestions partly for that reason. Why did we create such activities? What was the purpose of all this? And have we strayed from that purpose? Or perhaps we should consider this question first: If everything is based on our constructs, should we create new ones or seek the truth? That’s what really leaves me in a dilemma.