Festival Leaders Confront Growing Political Pressure at Lumiere Summit: ‘We Don’t Judge Artists by Their Passport’

Political pressure on film and television festivals emerged as a defining theme of a panel discussion Monday at the Lumière Summit in Saint-Paul-de-Vence, France, with Séries Mania general director Laurence Herszberg issuing the session’s most direct call for protection of programming autonomy. “We don’t judge artists by their passport, we judge them by their works,” Herszberg said. The panel, titled “Easy to Criticize, Impossible to Replace: Rethinking the Festival” and moderated by Rajendra Roy, chief curator of film at MoMA, brought together festival chiefs from Berlin, Cannes, Toronto, San Sebastián, Annecy, Mumbai, Durban, the Red Sea and South by Southwest. It covered three areas: audiences and community, how festivals relate to the media, and the mounting economic and political strains on festival leadership. Herszberg was direct on the political pressure facing her and her peers. “We feel more and more under pressure from different groups,” she said. “They might be politicians, they might be just people who disagree with the representation of some countries.” As general director of Séries Mania – a free-access festival with 1,500 seats – she said controlling who walks through the door is not possible. “We have to be protected, and we still have to go on and fight for the artists,” Herszberg said. Popular on Variety Cameron Bailey, chief executive of the Toronto Film Festival, which launches its first formal market this year, echoed the sentiment. “Filmmakers are not their nations, and shouldn’t be treated as such by anyone,” Bailey said. He recalled joining TIFF as a programmer in 1990, “at a time when festivals felt like a completely free and open space.” Bailey pointed to TIFF’s Next Wave youth program – now 15 years old – as a long-term investment in building young audiences. “‘Obsession’ became one of the biggest sales at a film festival in a long, long time,” Bailey said, noting that Next Wave participants had championed the title. On the rationale for TIFF’s new market, Bailey said: “The market is also part of that ecosystem – I mean, a terrible way to put it would be that it’s the fertilizer of the ecosystem, but really, it’s what feeds” a constant supply of ambitious films. Berlinale festival director Tricia Tuttle, whose event drew 450,000 admissions last year, and was at the eye of a political storm, put audience development at the center of her contribution. “The answer for me to all of these challenges is to really think about audiences,” Tuttle said, adding that reaching people who are not yet passionate cinemagoers matters as much as serving those who are. Cannes president Iris Knobloch pointed to the breadth of her festival’s annual gathering – 40,000 accredited participants from 140 countries, with over 4,000 journalists in attendance. “For me, that is the real shining light on films and the talent all over the world,” Knobloch said. Faisal Baltyuor, chief executive of the Red Sea Film Foundation, said his organization’s last edition sold out every screening. “We have a lot of creative talents that need that boost to make it to the international stage,” Baltyuor said, noting that 11 films the Foundation supported appeared in Venice and eight were heading to Toronto. On the festival-press relationship, Peter Debruge – now director of the South by Southwest Film & TV Festival after a 20-year tenure at Variety, the last ten as chief critic – put the case for studio films serving discovery. “The studio-level films are the sizzle that brings the attention, the press, and the audiences to the discoveries,” Debruge said. Maialen Beloki, deputy director of San Sebastián, pointed to shrinking press resources as a structural problem. “Each year, media send less and less critics to the festival,” Beloki said. She added that the race to break news online carries its own cost. “We are losing our capacity to talk about the films with some time and with some respect,” Beloki said. Shivendra Singh Dungarpur, founding director of the Film Heritage Foundation and director of the MAMI Festival in Mumbai, said his screenings of restored films regularly attract between 1,000 and 1,400 people and that all MAMI events are free of charge. “I believe that a film festival has to be for everyone,” Dungarpur said. He described the MAMI Independent outreach initiative that partnered with a major cinema chain to bring independent films to cities across India ahead of the festival proper. Mickaël Marin, from the Annecy Animation Film Festival, said that since his appointment in 2018 he has worked to open Annecy to general audiences beyond its traditional professional base, including through a permanent exhibition space that opened last June. “We have a worldwide community of animation coming here in Annecy, from the school, from the student, up to the platform,” Marin said. Magdalene Reddy, director of the Durban FilmMart Institute, said the core challenge in Africa is not finding audiences but reaching them in the absence of sufficient cinema infrastructure. “For us, engaging with audiences is really going into the community,” Reddy said. When moderator Roy closed the session by asking whether festivals could survive without the American industry – demanding a yes or no – Reddy was the only panelist to answer no, while noting that her focus remains squarely on African content.