Scope: An Online Journal of

Film and Television Studies

Issue 26
February 2014

DOSSIER: Film Festival Pedagogy: Using the Film

Festival in or as a Film Course

Introduction to the Dossier

Ger Zielinski, Trent University

Film festivals are now virtually ubiquitous. In fact, it is difficult to find a

city or town where none exists, while their online presence is beginning to
be enthusiastically explored. Along with the proliferation of film and
media studies courses and programs in universities around the world, the
question addressed by the seven scholars whose texts are included in this
dossier, centers on how to make good pedagogical use of film festivals in
relation to such courses. The collection itself stems from a very popular
workshop titled Film Festival Pedagogy that took place at the 2012 annual
conference of the Society for Cinema and Media Studies (SCMS) in
Boston, a workshop sponsored by the Film and Media Festivals Scholarly
Interest Group. The original idea for the workshop came from its
wonderful co-chairs Eric Pierson and Roger Pace, who are based at the
University of San Diego. [1]

As the wide range of texts included in this dossier suggests, there are
many ways to relate a film or media course to one or more festivals. A
course centered on the study of film festivals may use a particular festival
as its site, the theme of the festival and its films may provide the main
subject matter of the course, or the constraints of the festival through,
say, its programming principles may provide another angle for the study
of genre, national or continental-themed film festivals. Different levels of
study offer different degrees of sophistication in research methods and
theoretical frameworks, while the divide between humanities and social-
sciences approaches poses interesting problems that always need to be
addressed in the design of any course. Some instructors elect to travel to
a special A-list international film festival, while others choose to make use
of another type or a local film festival. To be sure, there is certainly room
to develop and expand upon the several courses that we each in turn
describe and analyze below.

Eric Pierson (epierson@sandiego.edu) and Roger Pace

(pace@sandiego.edu) co-teach a special intensive course Teaching
Sundance that is held entirely at the Sundance Independent Film Festival
itself. Their course is in fact immersive and on site. Students arrive in
Park City five days before the festival begins for meetings and a thorough

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Zielinski et. al.

orientation. The course balances both the formal, aesthetic exploration of

what independent films can be and the cultural, economic aspect of the
context of the festival and how it serves the filmmakers and their films.
As the instructors note, [t]he course will introduce students to the theory
and practices of the independent film. Students will engage the films and
filmmakers firsthand through a series of screenings, panels, course
lectures, and class assignments. This course is particularly innovative
for how its entire duration is held at the festival during the university
intersession between semesters.

Lindiwe Dovey (ld18@soas.ac.uk), based at the School of Oriental and

African Studies (SOAS, London), directs and is the head programmer at
Film Africa, an African film festival in London. In her masters seminar
Curating Africa: African Film and Video in the Age of Festivals, Dovey
approaches the study of African films, as a continental cinema, by way of
the question: how has African cinema been framed through curation at
film festivals, ranging from African film festivals to A-list international film
festivals, such as those in Berlin, Cannes or Venice? As she recounts, I
wanted [students] to feel empowered to make their own decisions about
what constitutes an African film, and I wanted them to take away from
the course not only academic knowledge of the subject, but also practical
experience.

Dorota Ostrowska (ubwc156@mail.bbk.ac.uk (Birkbeck College,

University of London) and Skadi Loist (skadi.loist@uni-hamburg.de)
(University of Hamburg) bring their respective classes to the Berlin
International Film Festival (as known as the Berlinale) annually. While
quite separate courses, these two scholars collaborate in arranging
meetings with festival workers, filmmakers and industry people, among
others, in advance of arriving in Berlin. On the one hand, Ostrowskas
masters seminar takes an interdisciplinary humanities approach to
studying many crucial aspects of film-festival culture, and combines
archival research and report writing in the course. Loist, on the other
hand, addresses film festivals from a media-studies framework in her
bachelors seminar Film Festivals: Theories, Economy and Cultural
Contexts, and makes use of not only the Berlinale but also the local
Filmfest Hamburg, which permits interested students to choose one or
both to study.

Film courses may be built around a regional film festival. Ger Zielinski
(geraldzielinski@trentu.ca) (Trent University) and Logan Walker
(lwalker@ucsc.edu) (University of California, Santa Cruz) each make use
of a local film festival. Zielinski integrates a local social-justice film
festival into a senior undergraduate seminar on film exhibition and
festivals, which places the emphasis on the festival as a cultural
formation. The course uses the local festival as a site for informal study

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 Film Festival Pedagogy

and experience of the event of the festival, while discussions of the

readings in seminar are informed by those students more actively
involved in the festival as volunteers. On his introductory film course The
Art of Film, Walker notes, [w]e discuss the ways that regional cultures
influence film festivals and the ways that film festivals can affect their
regions, while including such innovative activities as student-directed
mock programming, e.g. a mixed-genre program proposed to be held at
midnight in the center of a local cornfield maze. While the emphasis of
such a survey course is clearly not on film festivals, it brings to light how
an instructor can creatively integrate sophisticated practices, such as
festival programming, into a course with a broader purview.

Several contributors have provided links to the online versions of their

syllabus to help readers or potential instructors of such a course get a
sense for the varied structures, readings and assignments. While we take
this to be a pioneering intervention in film-studies pedagogy through the
use of film festivals, we are confident that the area will continue to
flourish and look forward to receiving your feedback on the development
of your own courses. Bonne projection, bon festival!

Teaching Independent Film at Sundance

Eric Pierson and Roger Pace, University of San Diego

Each year, the Communication Studies Department at the University of

San Diego offers a film course in independent cinema at the Sundance
Film Festival. The course occurs in January, between the fall and spring
semesters. An immersive film education experience, the course combines
traditional coursework with festival experiences in which students see as
many as 20 to 30 films. The course introduces students to the theory and
practices of independent film, and engages the films and filmmakers
firsthand through a series of screenings, panels, course lectures and class
assignments. It was offered for the first time in 2004, and since then
over 250 students have participated in the course. In this piece, we will
discuss the structure of the course and the expected student learning
outcomes.

Having attended a number of film festivals as both fans and scholars, we

were aware of ways festivals can remove the barriers between film
practitioners and those interested in the art of film whether that interest
is as scholar, an audience member or just a curious observer. The nature
of many film festivals is organized chaos: too few tickets, too many
attendees, concerns regarding transportation between venues, staffing of

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both volunteers and professionals, accommodations for festival attendees,

and in the case of Sundance, the potential for weather-related problems.
The challenge in creating the course was how to turn the energy and
unpredictability of this organized chaos into a solid academic course.
We began by carefully constructing the following learning objectives and
measurable student learning outcomes:

Students will understand the history and importance of the

Sundance Film Festival for independent cinema;
Students will engage and converse first hand with filmmakers,
critics and fans of independent film;
Students will be able to compare and contrast multiple approaches
to independent cinema;
Students will be able to define and articulate the economics of film
and the importance of Sundance as a marketplace for independent
cinema;
Students will be able to recognize and define the distinguishing
characteristics of independent film;
Students will be able to identify alternate film language (i.e.
narration, lighting, camera angles and acting) that characterizes
independent film;
Students will be able to describe the history of independent cinema
including important films and filmmakers in the genre;
Students will be able to define and explicate alternate voices in
independent film; and
Students will articulate the role of independent film in political and
social change.

After wrestling with learning outcomes and course objectives, we needed

to address several logistical hurdles, such as obtaining festival tickets,
finding housing and securing classroom space for the ten days of the
Sundance Film Festival. Preparation for the course begins almost a year
prior to attending the festival. Hotel rooms and other types of housing
are very difficult to secure in Park City, so it is wise to secure rooms as
far in advance as possible. Accommodations during the festival can be
very expensive; however, one can save a considerable amount by
booking well in advance. It is also good practice to book classroom space
early. Most hotels are willing to provide meeting space as part of the
accommodations package.

Students carry a great deal of the responsibility for securing tickets to the
festival, so it is imperative that they commit to the course early. We hold
informational meetings in April, and the majority of students enroll
themselves in the course before the end of the spring term. During the
summer and early fall, Sundance releases the ticketing information, and it
is crucial that students respond in a timely manner. Students can register

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 Film Festival Pedagogy

for tickets and festival passes beginning the second week in September.
In order to facilitate timely student response, we send out regular emails
and have built a Facebook page to keep students informed.

The instructional elements of the course begin in September, when

students are presented with a pre-departure screening list. This list is
designed to expose students to a number of independent films. Because
the course has no prerequisites, the pre-festival screening list helps to
ensure that all students will have some exposure to a variety of
independent films prior to beginning the course. For many students, this
will be the first time they have screened an independent film that has not
crossed over and enjoyed success with mainstream audiences. For
example, students are usually familiar with films such as Memento
(2000), Pulp Fiction (1994) or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) but
they have little awareness of films like Lone Star (1996), Yes (2004) or
Husbands (1970). The pre-departure screening list is divided into five
categories and attempts to give students an introduction to Sundance.
The categories are as follows: Sundance classics, Sundance recent,
Sundance women, Sundance documentaries and Sundance
underrepresented. Sundance classics highlights films, which were
screened during the first fifteen years of the festival, while, Sundance
recent focuses on films from the last ten years of the festival. Sundance
women is a crucial category given the shortage of women filmmakers; it
also underscores the importance of Sundance as a forum for films
focusing on womens stories. The Sundance documentaries section allows
students to engage documentarians beyond Michael Moore. The
Sundance underrepresented category allows instructors to highlight a
particular type of film or filmmaker, such as Native American filmmakers
or a subject like the presentation of mental illness. Students must write a
one-page critique of each film prior to their arrival in Park City, Utah,
home of the festival. In addition to exposing students to the types of
films that find their way into the festival, these critiques also help in
lecture design. We are then able to look for trends in the viewing choices
and use the films screened as reference point during class lecture and
discussions.

The on-site component of the class begins five days before the festival
when students arrive in Park City. A meeting room in the hotel becomes
a makeshift classroom during our stay. In an effort to ensure that the
course has the proper amount of contact hours, we begin class the
evening the students arrive, and over the next four days, we hold three-
hour classes twice daily, once in the morning and another in the evening.
While the morning class is focused on readings for the course and is
lecture- and discussion-driven, we introduce the students to the language
of filmmaking and criticism, highlighting concepts specific to independent
film. The evening session is an extension of the morning class, as we

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screen a film and focus a particular element of film language or a specific

filmmaker. In order to give students ownership of the experience, we
limit the number of required class meetings after the festival begins.
Once the festival begins, the class meetings take place off-site, in the
form of meetings during specific films or panels.

During the festival, the students are required to screen a minimum of 20

films and keep a log of their festival activities. Sundance offers several
categories for film. Students must select at least one film from each
category and attend at least one of the many film or art installations
around the festival. Having students select at least one film from each
category leads to a fuller film-engagement experience and also keeps
students from selecting films based on the likelihood that a celebrity may
be present at the screening. From the required 20 films, the students
must select eight for a detailed writing assignment. These critiques
require the students to integrate course concepts into the ways that they
examine film and also ask the students to explore the marketability of a
film in detail. They must put themselves in the role of distributor to
determine how much they are willing to pay for a film and how and to
whom they would market the film. This assignment requires students to
think about the multiple levels of the film business. Additionally, through
these critiques, students are given the opportunity to explore independent
film as a mechanism for social change and activism.

We have intentionally presented our version of the course in a broad

framework; the framework is an excellent place to begin structuring a
course that can be a unique experience for each group that attends. No
two Sundance festivals are the same, so be prepared to be nimble in
planning and flexible in expectations.

Curating Africa: Teaching African Film Through

the Lens of Film Festivals

Lindiwe Dovey, SOAS, University of London

Over the seven years that I have been teaching African film at the
university level, I have found myself descending into a pedagogical crisis
of sorts. How is one to teach courses on African cinema, to teach the film
cultures of an entire continent? Most contemporary scholarship on African
film acknowledges outright that there have been, and continue to be,
many cinematic trends and traditions across Africa, and this
acknowledgement is self-evident when one considers that there are 54
distinct African countries with significant ethnic, linguistic and cultural

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diversity within their national borders. One has only to compare a film by
Tunde Kelani (a Nigerian filmmaker who draws to a great extent on
Yoruba culture in his films) and Alain Gomis (a filmmaker originally from
Senegal, now based in France) to recognize that it is practically
impossible to define an African Cinema.

One way to begin to talk about African Cinema, however, is through

reflecting on how Africa has been, and continues to be, curated through
film, particularly at film festivals (which have largely been responsible for
sustaining the idea of African Cinema). One sense of African Cinema
was born at film festivals such as the Journes Cinmatographiques de
Carthage in Tunisia (the earliest film festival on the continent, founded in
1966), and FESPACO, which takes place in Ouagadougou, Burkina Faso
(founded in 1969). These were the fresh, heady days of newfound
political independence and freedom for many African countries, and a
strong spirit of pan-Africanism flourished across the continent.
Filmmakers from different African countries met at festivals and
conferences from Algiers to Harare, shared their work with one another,
sought confluences and drew up manifestos about what African Cinema
should and might be. These early attempts by Africans to define African
Cinema occurred almost simultaneously with the most renowned
international film festivals, such as Berlin, Cannes and Venice,
discovering and screening the work of particular African filmmakers,
such as the Senegalese director Ousmane Sembene. As a result, these
filmmakers developed international reputations as African auteurs, the
representatives of a different version of African Cinema, externally
defined. Several decades later, from the early 1980s onwards, a new
kind of canonization of African film began, with the rise of African film
festivals outside of the continent, such as the Verona African Film Festival
(founded in 1982) and Vues dAfrique in Montreal (founded in 1985). I
joined this tide in 2002, when I co-founded the Cambridge African Film
Festival in the UK. Later, I co-founded the London African Film Festival,
and then, in 2011, Film Africa Londons current annual festival
celebrating African film, which takes place across ten days every
November. In the past decade, there has also been an unprecedented
growth in film festivals on the continent, although most of these festivals
call themselves international rather than African film festivals.

It should then be clear why any university class on African Cinema

necessarily invokes a study of film festivals, for it is festivals that have
curated the concept into being. However, in addressing my pedagogical
crisis around how to teach the now vast body of audiovisual work referred
to under this umbrella term, I wanted to go further than develop a class
that looked historically at how various film festival programmers have
defined African Cinema. I wanted to draw on my twelve-year
experience of curating African film and founding and directing African film

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festivals to encourage my students to think not only like students but also
like curators. I wanted them to feel empowered to make their own
decisions about what constitutes an African film, and I wanted them to
take away from the class practical experience as well as academic
knowledge. The result was the development of Curating Africa: African
Film and Video in the Age of Festivals, a single semester masters-level
class, for which there is a prerequisite masters-level class on the history
of film in Africa. The assessment methods for Curating Africa are two
short essays during the semester, and a long scholarly or curatorial essay
as well as the presentation of an original film-festival concept and
program at the end of the semester. Beyond the credit students gain for
the class, they also gain formal acknowledgement for helping me with my
curatorial work, since many of the ideas they bring to the class inspire
me.

Two pedagogical principles thus underline the nature of the class: first,
that conventionally there is a certain body of knowledge that the teacher
possesses that the students do not possess (hence their interest in the
class); second, that each student also contributes to the construction of
new knowledge about the subject under consideration. The fact that
there is a prerequisite class before students are allowed to take Curating
Africa addresses the first pedagogical principle. It suggests that without
the teacher passing on significant background awareness to the students,
such as how the film medium was introduced and first made use of in
Africa, the students will not be ethically placed to start to think of
themselves as curators of African film. The historical and contemporary
controversies around how Africa has been represented by outsiders
demand that students reckon with this history before starting to construct
their own definitions of African film. The second pedagogical principle
insists, however, that the teacher should also recognize that she or he is
not omniscient on the subject, and has much to learn from the students,
particularly when dealing with a territory as vast as Africa. Knowledge is
a difficult, dynamic thing. It can only be defined in community, through
dialogism and negotiation.

Curating Africa is thus, in many ways, an advanced class similar to a

graduate seminar in the US context. After the prerequisite class, the
students will understand the history of film production, distribution and
exhibition in Africa. They will also be familiar with the most important
film movements across Africa, from the social realism of the 1960s to
the growth of video film production from the 1980s onwards. By the end
of the prerequisite course, they will have seen how difficult it becomes to
define African Cinema, and this dilemma then becomes the starting
point for the class Curating Africa, which asks the student to construct his
or her own ideas on the subject rather than depending on the teachers
knowledge alone. Independent research is encouraged throughout the

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 Film Festival Pedagogy

class. This might include internet research, interviews and discussions

with African filmmakers and curators, attendance at film festivals, and
broad viewing of new African films. Curators are also brought in to
deliver guest lectures throughout the class, so that the students receive
exposure to different curatorial approaches.

The diversity and originality of past students research and ideas is

evident in a selection of some of the film-festival concepts that have been
presented in the class: the Deaf Film Festival of Kampala (by Caitlin
Pearson); the Bogota African Film Festival (by Nicole Parr); Movimientos:
A Spanish-Senegalese Music Film Festival in Seville and Dakar (by Estrella
Sendra); Myths of Africa, a suggested strand for the already existent
Calgary International Film Festival in Canada (by Robin Steedman); a
one-off Chris Ofili Multi-Media Festival in London (by Sophie Harrison);
and the Pan-Ghana Film Festival (by Esther Lodders). Some of the
students are now attempting to realize these festivals, while others are
content to have informed the programming of Film Africa. Either way,
they have gained some practical experience since they have learned
about the logistics of film programming and festival directing during the
class. The class is also designed to give students the confidence to find
and define knowledge for themselves. Teaching students to be skeptical
thinkers and to feel empowered to engage directly with the world is as
important as teaching them a body of knowledge developed through
previous research by the teacher.

As will then be evident, I am not as concerned with film festivals as an

object of study in Curating Africa: African Film and Video in the Age of
Festivals. I am more interested in how teaching through the lens of film
festivals can be a catalyst for a certain kind of pedagogy, scholarship and
means of human interaction. Ultimately, I want to make the students
aware of how university classes are themselves curations curations that
should always be open to critique, since they are invariably statements
about what counts and what does not. The first time I taught Curating
Africa, I closed the class with an experiment in which the students had to
pretend to be a jury, judging the best of eight short African films. I
mostly kept myself in the background, allowing the students to construct
and negotiate their own ideas about what constitutes a quality film. The
experiment was so successful in helping students to understand in an
immediate and active way that taste is subjectively and socially
constructed that the students encouraged me to begin the class with the
jury experiment in the future. This is a perfect example of how the
students themselves have helped to curate the class Curating Africa,
contributing to its ongoing improvement.

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Film Festival Pedagogy

Dorota Ostrowska, Birkbeck College, University of London

Film Festivals is a masters-level elective module open to students enrolled

either in the MA Film, Television and Screen Media, MA World Cinema or
MA Creative Industries at the School of Arts, Birkbeck College. The
module is split into three main areas: firstly, there are weekly seminars,
which focus on such key concepts in film festivals studies as space and
location, aesthetics and politics of festival films, curating and
programming, festival audiences, the role of stars, critics and juries, and
the place of the industry and the markets at film festivals; secondly, there
is a practical component of the module consisting of a field trip to the
Berlinale, which offers students a first-hand experience of a major
international film festival; thirdly, there is the students response to the
festival, which is a report from their field trip to the Berlinale, and a
5,000-word research paper on a topic of their choice within the area of
film-festival studies.

The development of the module was made possible thanks to the growing
research in the area of film-festival studies. As the bulk of the available
research is informed by methodologies derived from social sciences,
media and communication studies, many of these sources are not easily
accessible to the students in film studies with the humanities background.
As they learn how to work through this new interdisciplinary approach,
there is also a special effort being made during the seminars to ground
the study of film festivals within the disciplines of film, cultural studies
and history. For this reason, much attention is devoted to the study of
festival films as aesthetic phenomena, to their place and impact on film
history through canon formation, and to the processes of curating and
film criticism.

The overall amount of teaching resources available to deliver such a film-

festival module at the graduate level and to offer students the basis to
research and write their own essays is still quite limited. The students
often remark that the existing studies are quite general in nature and
provide a wide overview of film-festival culture, while their essays have to
be focused and more narrow in their choice of topics. For this reason, the
students taking the module are encouraged to use in their essays the
original Berlinale material they researched for their fieldwork reports. In
this way their dependency on published research on film festivals is less,
as the essays involve a detailed case study based on the empirical
material from the Berlinale. Some students decide to work on historical

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 Film Festival Pedagogy

topics that require research in film archives that often yields very
interesting results.

The trip to the Berlinale is a mandatory practical element of an otherwise

academic course. The students experience of the festival is that of an
accredited and therefore a privileged spectator when it comes to the
access to films, industry debates and events. But the fact that the
students experience is primary that of spectators inevitably makes their
status ambiguous in comparison to other individuals who are accredited to
the festival for professional reasons. The students are not involved in any
curating practice, participating in the jury or awards debates, working as
critics, or trying to network at the festival in order to advance their
project. The fieldwork reports not only help students navigate the festival
but also give them a sense of purpose and direction. As a result, they
feel more actively involved with the festival and have a strong reason to
seek contacts with film-festival and industry professionals, as well as to
explore various aspects of the festivals, not just the film screenings.

The daily meetings and discussions with a carefully selected group of

industry speakers perform a very important role in the students learning
experience and are an opportunity for them to exchange their experience
of the festival as well as to maintain a sense of community in the hectic
festival environment. The encounters not only expand the students
horizons and their knowledge of the festival and make the experience
more intense; they also make the theoretical and historical study of film
festivals come alive for the students in a very different way. The
meetings offer the students a real taste of what it means to participate at
an international film festival as an industry professional, and deepen their
understanding of the role film festivals play for the film industry in
Europe.

Given the central role played by the Berlinale field trip in the overall
design of the module, the most productive ways of developing it was to
further enhance the practical element. Giving the students an
opportunity to curate their own film festival was definitely a step in the
right direction as it corresponds to the students expectations of this
module. Starting in the new academic year 2013-2014, the interested
students will be able to expand their knowledge of film festivals by taking
the module Exhibiting the Moving Image, which explores the practices of
curating in much greater depth than the Film Festivals module. Both
modules will thus complement each other by integrating various strands
in the Birkbeck provision to enhance further the students understanding
and engagement with the area of film-festival studies both theoretically
and practically.

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Teaching Film Festivals: Between Theory and

Practice

Skadi Loist, University of Hamburg

Since 2008, I have had the opportunity to develop and regularly teach the
undergraduate course Film Festivals: Theories, Economy and Cultural
Contexts in the BA program Media and Communication Studies at the
University of Hamburg. The idea for the course came out of my research
on film festivals and work with the Film Festival Research Network (FFRN)
[2] , which Marijke de Valck and I founded in 2008. It became clear
early on that simply adding a unit to a course on film history would not
suffice to cover the complex levels of festival operations and connected
discourses. Thus, the course is designed as a full fourteen-week seminar
with a theoretical and analytical focus on film-festival studies. It includes
practical elements, such as bringing festival organizers into the
classroom, and is flanked by the option to attend two international
festivals before and following the semester (Filmfest Hamburg and the
Berlin International Film Festival, in short the Berlinale).

Due to the module structure of the three-year BA program in Media and

Communication Studies, the course was offered as an elective within the
second-year module Media History and Contemporary Media, but on
request was also open as an elective to third-year BA students and
students in the MA program Media Studies. As a university program, the
BA has a theoretical and analytical emphasis, covering broader theories
and topics across media (history, theory and aesthetics of film, television,
radio, internet, gaming etc.). The film-festival course broadens the scope
of the program by highlighting a media-industries angle, which is not
otherwise part of the curriculum. The course is not designed to train
students as curators or festival managers; case studies are based on
research and analysis, not practical festival organization.

Since the course is an elective within a required module, there are a

number of diverging motivations for taking it. Over the years, a number
of students took it because they were involved with festivals themselves.
Some were drawn by the opportunity to attend Filmfest Hamburg and the
Berlinale on student accreditations offered in conjunction with the course.
Others just wanted to earn credit in the required module. At times, these
diverging interests and expectations made it hard to navigate the course
and led to an expansion of the practical elements.

Requirements include: 1) regular attendance; 2) to prepare reading for all

sessions, where some students serve as respondents to selected texts

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 Film Festival Pedagogy

and prepare questions to aid the discussion; 3) to either give brief oral
presentations which provide definitions on a set of concepts, such as legal
organization forms (for profit/non-profit), sales agents, film licensing,
agenda setting, community/audience, counter/public spheres and
trans/national film; 4) to answer small research questions as homework
to prompt thinking about how to obtain research information on festivals
(e.g. figures on funding etc.); 5) to either write a final 12-15-page paper
or hand in three short essays (4 pages each) at chosen sessions
throughout the semester.

One of the challenges in creating the syllabus for a theory-driven course

was finding accessible literature. As a course taught in Germany to
German undergraduates, the reading had to reflect the language and
background. Some books (Reichel-Heldt, 2007; Jungen, 2009) and
translations of key texts (Elsaesser, 2010; Peranson, 2010) are available
in German. These were supplemented by texts in English (De Valck,
2007; Iordanova and Rhyne, 2009; Wong, 2011). As the field is quickly
developing, more books and articles become available. Yet, a dedicated
textbook with chapters accessible to undergraduate students is still
outstanding.

The course covers several angles of the complex structure of film

festivals. It starts with an opening section introducing the field of film-
festival studies, setting out with a discussion of what constitutes a film
festival (considering differences in size, context and specializations) and
covering the history of the circuit. The second segment covers
organizational structures, funding and stakeholder theory. The third
segment sets a framework by categorizing specialized festivals and their
characteristics (genre, identity and community-based festivals). The
fourth segment covers programming, selection processes and value
addition through awards. A fifth segment approaches larger contexts
beyond single case studies, looking at the film-festival circuit, calendar
and transnational film circulation. The last segment discusses the current
trends and problems of the circuit and devotes one session to the
Berlinale in preparation for an excursion to the festival. (For a detailed
breakdown of the course, see the syllabus online at:
http://tinyurl.com/7ju3lee)

Thanks to the collaboration with the local international film festival,

Filmfest Hamburg, which takes place a few weeks before the semester
starts in mid-October, students had the opportunity to visit the festival on
a free accreditation. In addition, the festival offered a unique guided tour
for the students, which took them through the offices and festival
departments, providing a first-hand, behind-the-scenes view into
operations while the festival was in full swing. Students met and talked
to the festival director, programmer, press department, side bar

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Zielinski et. al.

coordinator, and those responsible for marketing, fundraising and

sponsorship, film traffic, guest services and more. Here, students get a
first view into the complex structure of an expanding workplace with 70
employees during the festival run, of which only six permanent staff
remain after the festival is over (Loist, 2011).

As the Filmfest Hamburg tour takes place outside of official semester

dates, it is a voluntary offer and not a requirement. However, experience
shows that the practical elements are key to teaching film-festival studies
especially at the undergraduate level. In order to provide festival
insight also for those who cannot attend the pre-semester tour, several
in-class meetings with festival organizers have been integrated. The
experience of attending a festival and speaking with organizers is
essential for students in order to relate to and understand the operations
of such an event and to be able to study this complex entity in an
abstract, theoretical manner.

In the last edition of the course, three sessions with practitioners were
included throughout the semester:
1) The director of Filmfest Hamburg gives a break-up of the festival
budget. This session adds detailed information to the tour and
opens the view to festivals as organizations, and their economic as
well as political relationship to various stakeholders. These issues
are taken up in the following sessions on an abstract level using
stakeholder theory, organizational studies and analyses of cultural
politics and funding structures.
2) The director of the Hamburg International Short Film Festival,
the head of Short Film Distribution (KurzFilmAgentur) and the
Childrens Short Film Festival (Mo & Friese) present their work
under one common umbrella organization. Aside from introducing
another local festival and case study of festival specialization, this
session provides insight into the business side of film distribution
connected to film festivals.
3) The programming director of Filmfest Hamburg talks about the
organic formation of a festival line-up. Her account of the everyday
work as a programmer provides insight into the pragmatics and
challenges of curating and supplements discussions of critical
writing on dynamics of power, inclusion and exclusion in
programming.

After the end of the semester, students have the opportunity to join an
excursion to the Berlinale. University affiliation makes discounted student
accreditations available. Thus, students have the chance to experience
the workings of an international A-list festival at home in Germany. The
trip was solely a voluntary event as these activities fall outside the

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 Film Festival Pedagogy

semester and arising costs for travel and accommodation had to be

covered privately.

A connection to colleague Dorota Ostrowska, established through the

FFRN, evolved into a collaboration between the course at the University of
Hamburg and the course she teaches in the MA program at Birkbeck
College, University of London (the syllabus can be found here:
http://tinyurl.com/c69xjob) in that we join efforts for the Berlinale
excursion in setting up meetings with film festival professionals for our
students. Among them were talks with the head of the World Cinema
Fund, the director of the Panorama section of the Berlinale, with critics
from trade and international presses, industry insiders giving an
introduction to the European Film Market and the Berlinale Talent
Campus, and more. This meant for my BA students from Hamburg that
they could directly translate and expand their gained knowledge to Berlin.

The course is quite organization-intensive, due to the amount of meetings

with guest speakers in Hamburg and Berlin. However, the efforts seem
worth it: the course enjoyed steady popularity over the years and proved
relevant and successful long-term as students later chose festivals as the
topic for their oral exams or BA or MA theses. Others reported that they
got involved in the organization of a festival themselves or found paid
jobs at or through the connections made at festivals. The collaboration
with local festivals also yields mutual benefits. While festivals share
information and insights to educate students, they often recruit interns or
seasonal workers there. Most recently, a festival commissioned an
audience survey, which will be conducted as part of a BA thesis project.

On How to Make the Most of the Local Film

Festival, Inside and Outside of the Classroom

Ger Zielinski, Trent University

Below I recount the process by which I came to integrate a well-chosen

local film festival into my seminar on film exhibition and festivals,
particularly how students were able to not simply attend but also learn
through participating in the festival as it prepared to open and through its
duration. I took the opportunity to make use of the local film festival as a
possible productive learning experience for interested students. The
emphasis in the course is more on the culture and institution of film
festivals than on the films as texts to be interpreted. The point is to work
to understand better how film festivals take place as a cultural formation

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Zielinski et. al.

from several theoretical positions, with attention given to the methods

employed in the research.

Let us consider first the rationale and development of the course. The
current version of the course stems from the experience of having created
a course on both film exhibition and film festivals, into which I aimed to
integrate not only historical and conceptual elements, but also practical
and experiential aspects. My motivation was in part informed by my own
experience of a variety of types of film festivals over the years, both as a
member of the audience and as a member of awards juries or boards of
directors of different festivals, but also informed pedagogically by how
much more engaging film and media courses can be for interested
students when combining theory and practice.

The nearest A-list international film festival would have been TIFF
(Toronto International Film Festival), which was a great temptation, but it
runs in the first half of September, more or less beginning with the start
of university classes, and the festival emphasis of the course was set for
the winter. All things considered, it made no sense to attempt any
connection between the course and that festival, except for a possible
volunteership for students the following year. Perhaps some future
edition of the course might find a way to make use of TIFF outside of its
September period. Its timing was too awkward for the course, and with
respect to the running of a course timing and proximity are crucial.

As I prepared the course further, I learned about the local ReFrame

Peterborough International Film Festival (http://reframefilmfestival.ca),
founded in 2006, which takes place annually at the end of January. The
unique combination of university and town has kept the festival
remarkably popular since its start, while its social-justice theme secures a
loyal public that spans several age groups. I decided it would be an
excellent fit, even if a little earlier in the term than I would have
preferred. The festivals social justice theme would likely appeal to many
of the students, and they would have an opportunity to become more
involved in its behind-the-scenes activities and organization as
volunteers.

The course itself is a two-term senior seminar, On the Politics and Culture
of Exhibition & Festival Practices, which combines film exhibition in the
first half with film festivals in the second. It is a required seminar for all
majors in cultural studies, so student investment in the topic varies.
Remarkably, only one student had been to a festival of any sort, the rest
had never attended one and did not know of the local ReFrame festival at
all. In seminar discussion earlier in the year, a few students stated their
ambition to start up their own exhibition venue, and another imagined
creating a festival.

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 Film Festival Pedagogy

The next step considers how to integrate the festival into the course.
There are many ways to make use of a cultural institution, whether it be
an archive, collection or cinmatheque, or a festival, as in this case. In
the end, I chose to include an experiential aspect in the required course,
but offer it as an option, since not all students would have the same level
of commitment to the material and assignments.

In the fall, I made contact with the executive director over a possible
session with the class. Krista English, co-founder and current executive
director of the festival, agreed to give a talk to the class on the history
and operation of the festival, after which she pitched the idea of
volunteering and the various roles possible. The session was highly
informative and created a lot of interest for students in volunteering.
After a few weeks following the session in class, interested students
attended the orientation meetings for volunteers and chose roles
according to their particular expertise e.g. managing the sound and
microphone during introductions to the films or question-and-answer
sessions following the screening, serving as ushers, selling tickets or
working on publicity, among other tasks. Moreover, the student
volunteers were also given passes to the festival and encouraged to see
the films (and witness their reception). The festival provides a wide
variety of types and genres of films, from narrative features to television
to engaged documentaries, all related to the festival's overriding theme of
social justice in some respect. Needless to say, to the average
undergraduate student, the vast majority of the films would be quite
fresh.

While the volunteering option only required that students write a short
report on what they learned through the festival, their practical
involvement in the festival was discussed in the weekly seminar meetings
in relation to the readings. The experience gave the students deeper
insight into a wide variety of such issues as festival programming, choice
of venue, funding, range of reactions from members of the public, press
packages, behind-the-scenes technical problems, personnel, hospitality
and so forth. While the volunteerships were not intended as formal
research methods experiences, they provided informal practical
experience to students who had never even attended a festival
previously. This gave them points of entry into understanding the stakes
and questions considered in the seminar's readings and guided their
essay topics. The final essay was centered on the readings at a more
theoretical level. In the end, the seminar, the students and the local
festival mutually benefited from the volunteering.

The use of the local film festival enabled a felicitous reciprocal relationship
between the course and the festival, which is to say that keen students

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Zielinski et. al.

learned much about festivals through their practical involvement, while at

the same time the festival itself also attained its goal of completing
another successful edition and contributing positively to the town's
cultural life. While trying to imagine a few possible future versions of this
course, I posit: had it not been a required course, it could be more
demanding and required student involvement in the festival. If it were a
masters-level seminar, more methodological work could be done. More
ambitious uses of the festival could be imagined in a different curricular
context, e.g. in a film school or in a masters program. In another town
or city with multiple festivals, more elaborate projects could certainly be
integrated into such a course. Whether the course is entirely or
tangentially focused on the study of festivals, festivals are increasingly
proving themselves as a useful pedagogical resource to film and media
studies more generally.

A Unit on Film Festivals Within an Introductory

Film Class

Logan Walker, University of California, Santa Cruz

I teach a unit on film festivals within an introductory film-studies class

called The Art of Film at Californias San Jose State University. The class
is a prerequisite for entering the undergraduate Radio-TV-Film program,
which trains students to produce work for the fields in the programs title.
The film-festival unit has been a fruitful way for students intending to be
majors as well as students taking the class as a general university
requirement to engage with exhibition and film programming matters, as
well as a way of introducing the students to the regions cinema culture.

The film-festival unit is brief, involving a week of discussion about

festivals and a mock, in-class festival at the end of the semester that
showcases short films that the students make during the later half of the
class. Toward the beginning of the semester, the students read Gideon
Bachmanns Confessions of a Festival Goer (1976), which outlines
differences in the cultures of the Venice Film Festival, the first major
international film festival, and more urban festivals such as the London
Film Festival. We discuss the ways that regional cultures influence film
festivals and the ways that film festivals can affect their regions. The
students also do an in-class film programming exercise that requires them
to think about the ways that films relate to one another and the ways that
exhibition spaces shape the film viewing experience. They watch a series
of short films that have played in festivals and, in groups, construct a
hypothetical program with a title, time, location and program notes using

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 Film Festival Pedagogy

at least three of the shorts. Students have seemed to enjoy this exercise
and have come up with surprising, creative programming ideas, among
them, Choosing Your Path, a mixed-genre program proposed to be held at
midnight in the center of a local cornfield maze.

In addition, students have the option of extending their study of film

festivals by undertaking an extra-credit assignment to read additional
material, visit a film festival at some time during the semester, and write
about their experience and what they discover about the festivals
relationship to its region. Although the experience of visiting a film
festival would be an essential component of a class focused on film
festivals, I do not require students in this introductory class to purchase
tickets to a festival. I offer this assignment as an option rather than a
requirement out of consideration for the students financial as well as time
constraints, as many of them are working while attending school or
commuting from another city to attend class. However, the last time I
taught the class, about one-fifth of my students choose to attend a
festival screening and write a short paper about it. My class is fortunate
in that San Jose is located near the many film festivals of the San
Francisco Bay and California Central Coast areas. A local San Jose
festival, Cinequest, has ties to the university and holds some of its
screenings at San Jose State, making it convenient for students to attend.

Other than the film-festival unit, most of the students time during the
class is spent analyzing individual films in terms of their form, and if the
students are successful in the class, I expect them to exit able to craft
arguments about films based upon such analysis. An additional benefit to
the students who attend festival screenings is they have the opportunity
to analyze the festival films they see during in-class discussions of film
form. The festival screenings become a means for students to exercise in
a non-academic environment the critical-viewing practices they learn in
the class. For students who do not continue studying film during their
academic careers, my aim for this exercise is to help them continue to
make connections between ideas they learn about during the class and
the films they watch after graduating.

I frame the final day of the semester as a film festival for the students
work. In the same groups that they formed to create hypothetical festival
programs, the students make short films that the class watches together
in this festival. While it is not possible to reproduce many aspects of a
film-festival experience for a classroom screening, this activity offers a
glimpse at some of the ways that film-festival screenings differ from other
kinds of exhibitions and brings some of those aspects of the festival to the
students who have not attended a festival screening before. For example,
the students participate in question-and-answer sessions after they play
their films, giving them the opportunity to practice speaking about their

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Zielinski et. al.

work in front of an audience. The students also developed award

categories and titles, suitable to the region, and voted on which films won
those awards, providing a lesson in the sometimes competitive aspects of
filmmaking.

While brief, this unit on film festivals seems to be inspiring for some
students. Former students of mine have become volunteers at local film
festivals. Such student investment in local film festivals benefits the
festivals and the local cinema community as well. While San Jose States
student body has a continuous presence within the city, it is constantly
changing as students graduate and leave San Jose for new jobs or less
expensive housing. As a programming associate for the Santa Cruz Film
Festival, which also has connections with the nearby University of
California, Santa Cruz, it can be difficult to make long-term connections
between a festival and college students, as they graduate and are
frequently busy with their studies. Introducing students and regional film
festivals to one another has the potential to enrich the work of each.

Notes

[1] For sample syllabi related to the essays in this dossier, follow the link
to the website of the Film Festival Research Network at
http://www.filmfestivalresearch.org/index.php/additional-
resources/syllabi-on-classes-teaching-film-festival-studies/.

[2] The Film Festival Research Network provides an extensive

bibliography on the topic on its website (www.filmfestivalresearch.org) as
well as additional resources, such as syllabi of courses taught. It also
operates a mailing list, to which anyone can subscribe via the website.

Bibliography

Bachmann, Gideon (1976) Confessions of a Festival Goer, Film Quarterly

29 (4), (Summer), pp 14-17.

De Valck, Marijke (2007) Film Festivals: From European Geopolitics to

Global Cinephilia. Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press.

Elsaesser, Thomas (2010) Filmfestival-Netzwerke: Die neue Topografie

des europischen Kinos, critic.de [online], 25 November. Available at:
<http://www.critic.de/special/thomas-elsaesser-filmfestival-netzwerke-
die-neue-topografie-des-europaeischen-kinos-3237/> [Accessed: 27
November 2010]

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 Film Festival Pedagogy

Iordanova, Dina and Ragan Rhyne (eds.) (2009) Film Festival Yearbook 1:
The Festival Circuit. St. Andrews: St. Andrews Film Studies.

Jungen, Christian (2009) Hollywood in Canne$: Die Geschichte einer

Hassliebe, 1939-2008. Marburg: Schren.

Loist, Skadi (2011) Precarious Cultural Work: About the Organization of

(Queer) Film Festivals, Screen 52 (2), pp. 268-273.

Peranson, Mark (2010) Erst kommt die Macht, dann das Geld: Zwei
Modelle von Filmfestivals, Revolver: Zeitschrift fr Film 21, pp. 116-131.

Reichel-Heldt, Kai (2007) Filmfestivals in Deutschland: Zwischen

kulturpolitischen Idealen und wirtschaftspolitischen Realitten. Frankfurt
am Main: Lang.

Wong, Cindy Hing-Yuk (2011) Film Festivals: Culture, People, and Power
on the Global Screen. New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press.

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