[Filmfestivalresearch] Launch of the Film Festival Academy

Skadi Loist | FFA skadi at filmfestivalacademy.net
Thu Sep 13 19:40:35 CEST 2012


Dear Colleagues

 

I am writing with news that should be of great interest to anyone working in the growing area of Film Festival Studies.

 

After five months in gestation, the new FILM FESTIVAL ACADEMY is launched today – please visit http://www.filmfestivalacademy.net

 

This major new initiative is an ambitious and innovative attempt to create a credible, useful, ethical and truly international community network platform for film festival professionals and others involved in the film festival world, including scholars and academic researchers, as well as film historians and film critics.

 

The Film Festival Academy has many plans to develop the flexible platform for knowledge exchange, training and collaboration within the film festival world. But it will also explicitly serve more academically inclined constituencies through an online library of festival-related publications, including newly commissioned and already published scholarly work, as well as festival-related film criticism, industry reports and festival catalogues. The Film Festival Academy will also be exploring options for funding research and relevant publication of that material in due course.

 

The project will be funded by a modest annual subscription model (€90, with an introductory offer of only €60 up to the end of 2012), various advertising and sponsorships, and external funding for vocational training. The whole operation is explicitly non-profit, with all revenues generated by the three avenues above going directly and transparently towards the services and activities of the project itself. These will primarily consist of organising industry events (conferences, seminars, lectures, training workshops etc) at and with international film festivals, mirrored by various content offered online, including access to those events by archived data for those unable to attend in person. The first event is already confirmed, to be held in association with the 50th edition of the New York Film Festival, and is scheduled for 27th/28th September.

 

The Film Festival Academy has been established by Yoram Allon, editorial director of Wallflower Press, specialist publishers devoted to trade and academic books on cinema and the moving image (now an imprint of Columbia University Press), and publisher of the International Film Guide, the definitive annual review of world cinema, in print since 1963; and Tomas Prasek, founder and director of Eventival, leading suppliers of festival data management software and keepers of the world's largest database of film festival professionals. In short, this is an initiative by film festival people for film festival people, and a genuine attempt to connect the disparate constituencies of film festival practitioners, academics working in the field of film festival studies, and film critics/historians seeking to chart the historical and contemporary contexts of the film festival world. To that end, an Advisory Board of forty or so experts from these areas is being created, and which already includes Thomas Elsaesser, Marijke de Valck, Adrian Martin and Lúcia Nagib.

Details about membership of the Film Festival Academy, very much open to all, are given online. Please do take a moment to visit. 

 

Again, this project has just been born and so very much will lie ahead, but, as can be seen from the testimonials already received, below, the project has already made a significant impact. Please feel free to contact me directly at any time for more information about our plans, and additional details as the project grows...

 

We hope that you do become involved, and consider membership of this unique project.

 

With kind regards

Skadi Loist

Academic Liaison, Film Festival Academy

skadi at filmfestivalacademy.net

 

 

 

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David Sterritt – Chair, National Society of Film Critics; USA

'The enormous growth of film festivals – in number, location, diversity, and artistic influence – is accelerating by the day. But not until now has their importance to global culture been matched by an organization with the cinematic acumen, media savvy, networking skills, and expert leadership needed to provide top-level support, training, information, and connectivity for participants in all areas of festival activity, from programmers and publicists to filmmakers, academics, and critics. The arrival of the Film Festival Academy is the most exciting development in years for moving-image professionals everywhere.'

 

Lúcia Nagib – Director, Centre for World Cinemas, University of Leeds; UK

'To focus on film festivals, not in opposition to but in articulation with critical and scholarly thought, is what world cinema needs in order to be understood in all its complexity. The Film Festival Academy deserves our applause and support for providing, for the first time, a common platform for festival professionals, critics and passionate spectators.'

 

Adrian Martin – Film Critic, and Co-Director of the Research Unit in Film Culture and Theory, Monash University; Australia

'Do Film Festivals need an Academy in this day and age? The answer is, resoundingly, yes! A complex mixture of the professional and the cultural, the economic and the cinephilic, film festivals today are increasingly complex beasts – and no festival is an island unto itself. Connected in a tight web of international exchanges, comparisons and manœuvres, festivals are all about giving value to particular films or particular types of films – and finding, or creating, the audiences for them. The new Film Festival Academy is ideally placed to integrate the already widely scattered field of researches, discussions, trainings and co-operative interrelationships occurring within and between the literally thousands of film festivals in the modern globe. It is a new world on every level – from the challenge of projection formats to the politics of curating – and the Film Festival Academy will open the doors to it.'

 

Andreas Ströhl – Head of Culture and Information Dept., Goethe Institute; Germany

'The Film Festival Academy has my full support. It is amazing that in a market overflowing with all kinds of professional training it has taken until today to come up with a simple and great idea: high level opportunities for the exchange of ideas and programmes for learning more about the complex art and the technical skills of running a film festival. Anybody who has participated in any of the rather dubious endeavours that were made in this field before will appreciate the non-profit approach of the Film Festival Academy; anybody who knows its founders will trust their professional knowledge and personal integrity. I will support the Film Festival Academy in every possible way.’

 

Tiina Lokk – Festival Director, Black Nights Film Festival; Tallinn, Estonia

'The new Film Festival Academy initiative is to be very much welcomed by all film festival professionals and anyone interested and involved in the increasingly central role played by film festivals in the international cinema industry; this is definitely the right thing at the right time and promises to be an exciting and important development that will be of great service to all of us working in the film festival arena.'

 

Faye Ginsburg – Director, Center for Media, Culture and History, New York University; USA

'The inauguration of the Film Festival Academy brings important and long overdue attention to film festivals as cultural locations for the traffic in filmmaking, from glitterati events with red carpets, to those that shed light on human rights abuses, to the world-building projects of activist communities.'

 

 

- - - - 
Skadi Loist
Academic Liaison
Film Festival Academy

+49 176 6204 0039

 <mailto:skadi at filmfestivalacademy.net> skadi at filmfestivalacademy.net
 <http://www.filmfestivalacademy.net/> www.filmfestivalacademy.net

FFA_logo

 

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