The Value of Film Festivals: Seeing Movies in a New Light

Film festivals are a strange thing. While most of the film business has been pushing toward making movie-viewing as private, convenient and accessible as possible, the film festival seems to counter all of these trends. Audiences are expected to stand in line for hours, pay higher than normal ticket prices, and scramble for a decent seat —  usually at an inconvenient time of day — to see a movie they know nothing about. Beyond this, many of the films that are shown at festivals are even more inaccessible. Often they are in a foreign language and are subtitled, star actors no one has ever heard of, and are about subjects that are depressing or just plain weird.

Despite all this, however, film festivals have multiplied and grown at a phenomenal rate over the past number of years.If as Christians we hold to general revelation, then it is possible to accept that within the created order we should see signs of God’s glory even in works of art such as film, and these moments of revelation should be surprising, dazzling and catch us off our guard. There are festivals in countless small towns across the continent — while in nearly every major city they have become virtually mandatory. Most attempt to attract new and high profile productions, usually of an artistic bent, but there are many which focus on a particular niche. There are festivals for horror films, for comedies, for animated films and for documentaries. There are also festivals for specific regions or groups in society, such as the Maritime Film Festival, the Jewish Film Festival and the International Christian Film Festival.

The granddaddy of all the festivals is in Cannes, in southern France, which takes place in May. For some filmmakers, winning at Cannes is a much bigger deal than winning at the Oscars. In the United States the two major film fests are the New York Film Festival and Sundance. NYFF is the largest and one of the oldest in the U.S. and Robert Redford’s Sundance has garnered a reputation for promoting Indie cinema.

The most recent festival I attended was the 2015 Toronto International Film Festival in late September. There over a week and a half I took in several dozen screenings, which included a mix of foreign art films, domestic indie movies, a couple of  “classy” Hollywood pics and the odd avant garde piece which defied any easy categorization.

The TIFF has a reputation for identifying films which go on to win big at the Oscars and Golden Globes, so there perhaps a bit more media attention on audience reception than most other festivals. Aside from this and all the hype over spotting celebrities at openings and parties, there is otherwise a pretty serious, even reverent, attitude to watching films during festival time. One might even say for many people, the experience of movie watching becomes a religious one. There is a silence which envelops an audience when a movie begins which is more than mere politeness, and there is a visibly animated passion in the discussions which occur in theater lobbies afterwards, which tells you that movies can still be far more than mere diversion. While I would certainly never say that the cinema is in any way a replacement for church, I was nevertheless astounded by how often movies could put us in touch with the spiritual.

Film festivals take us out of our ordinary habit of film watching. For most of us this means going to the multiplex, or watching at home on TV, DVD or via streaming. These venues, while convenient, are also prone to keeping us focused on a very limited category of film which we are familiar with. Much like the junk food we eat, we watch these movies because they are there, and they make us feel comfortable. Note for instance the preponderance of film franchises, sequels, remakes and reboots that are out in our theaters. It is becoming rarer and rarer to find a new movie which is not recycling an older one, or some other popular media product.

Television channels keep their movie programming to fairly limited and formulaic fare for fear of losing a wider audience, and streaming services such as Netflix contain algorithms which suggest movies that match previous patterns of viewing, keeping us on the same track and away from the too unfamiliar. Add to this the heavy marketing of major movies, and the ubiquity of their plot revealing trailers, and it is obvious to see that whatever new movies we do decide to go to we already know pretty much what to expect. And we get it. There is no longer any surprise or wonder left. We have become mere consumers and are no longer viewers or an audience.

Film festivals provide the exact opposite experience to all of this. While there is certainly some choice in selecting what movies we are going to watch, if the programmers of the festival are any good, they will generally be booking films which represent new, unique and unconventional points of view. As most festivals have mandates to exhibit new or obscure films, there is going to be little chance of being already too familiar with a particular film from trailers or word of mouth before we see it. Often when I go to festival movies I like to know nothing more about it than the title, and leave it to the film to reveal itself. Conversely, if the festival specializes in classics then the goal should be to rediscover older films of merit. By watching movies on larger screens in darkened and silent rooms we will notice things about them that we may not have noticed before, even if we had already seen a particular film on TV a dozen times previously. As such, festivals can give us back the revelatory power of cinema. Movies become not just escapist adventures or melodrama, but give us an encounter with the strange, the different, the wild, the unexpected, and sometimes, the divine.

If as Christians we hold to general revelation, then it is possible to accept that within the created order we should see signs of God’s glory even in works of art such as film, and these moments of revelation should be surprising, dazzling and catch us off our guard. Christians are to see the world with new eyes, and, in a parallel sense, the best of films can offer a way to see the world anew.

Yes, they can also give us encounters with the boring, the superficial and the outright awful, but I find that I have rarely regretted watching a festival film. Even when seeing movies that I came to loathe, I can still say I learned something deep and affecting from the overall experience. It’s even good to occasionally encounter something you really hate and figure out why you hate it so much. I have often thought more about the movies I can’t stand than the ones I casually like, and this can be productive.

Another reason festivals are important is that they often provide venues for films made outside of the Hollywood distribution system. This includes both international films and domestically produced independent pictures. From these we are given access to different and unfamiliar voices and perspectives.

International cinema can help make us sympathetic to people from difference places in the world. We learn of their specific cultural values through films and perhaps we even come to realize what our own cultural peculiarities and limitations are. Too often we mistake our own specific cultural values for universal or biblical values and film from other places can help us to correct this assumption.

Domestic independent cinema can do something similar. It takes us into the lives of those who live around us. We are given an insight into our neighbor. If we are to love our neighbor, independent cinema, much better than Hollywood cinema which gives us idealized projections and fantasies most of the time, can give us some insight into who our neighbor is. Above all, these kinds of films, both international and independent, allow us to recognize a common humanity which links us to people elsewhere in the world. We recognize them as fellow sinners in need of redemption.

Film festivals are important in that they give Christian filmmakers new artistic models to work with and Christian audiences to appreciate. The typical hero’s journey, or “classical paradigm” has dominated Hollywood storytelling for the past eighty years. While very effective and useful, it conditions audiences to certain expectations, some of which may not be very biblical. A conceit of most Hollywood movies is that the hero must overcome obstacles and achieve his goals through his own resources, whether they are his strength, his intellect or his will. It is not at all fitting for a hero to be utterly dependent on an outside and greater force. When Christians use the classical paradigm for their own films they are inevitably going to run into the problem of reconciling this heroic narrative with the Gospel demand of total dependence. Sometimes it can be successfully managed, often not. Put simply, Hollywood film conventions do not always go well together with Christian values.

Unfortunately much of the Christian film world has been geared towards the making Hollywood style films. This may be calculated for reasons of profitability, but it has also lead to a genre recognized primarily for its derivativeness and mediocrity. Alternative styles of filmmaking can give Christians with a desire to express themselves through cinema in a faithful way new possibilities and approaches.

When Christians start going more often to film festivals, they themselves may not be the only beneficiaries. If Christians begin to learn from the diverse body of work that appear at festivals, they may soon also begin to make works that are worthy of being shown at festivals as well. If this happens, Christianity may gain a new means of spreading the Gospel, and cinema as a whole will gain a newer and greater way of seeing the world.