Sometimes I get pretty excited — particularly when I can see the future starting to grow concrete right before my eyes. Sometimes it seems we can run right off the cliff into open space and lo and behold the road grows beneath you. I gave an interview to Fandor right after the first iteration of A2E at the 56th San Francisco International Film Festival. You can read the excitement in my voice. I was speaking about that road emerging below our feet:
The important thing for creative people to recognize is that the business of filmmaking is one of relationship with their community. Previously, we saw our business as that work product, generally the feature film, not the relationship of it. As a result, we reinvented the wheel time and time again. We built up the same audience each time that we did it, whether it was our own films, or films of a similar nature. We did not maintain—or even give room to participate—for folks from the outside world; but, the goal I think is that ultimately communities take responsibility for the things that they want. What that means is we move from being a passive consumer culture to an active participatory culture where part of being a community is also being a patron of the things that you care about, whether it’s in the film space or any other cultural/societal/social enterprise. We have to make the things that we want happen. We can’t wait for them to arrive. The beauty of the era we’re living in is that we actually now have the tools, the connectability, to actually make what we want happen. If you want this movie that you love to be seen in Thailand, your enthusiasm and passion with a little bit of effort can make that happen. That bridge that you built now can be reinforced and used by a whole bunch of folks. Soon those friends of yours in Thailand are seeing a flow of the movies they were denied before.
What’s really interesting for us folks here in San Francisco is that America—for whatever reason—doesn’t seem to want to let the outside world in. We build fences and barriers and stop the immigration of ideas, culture and individuals. But for fifty six years through the film festival, San Francisco has created a history of people coming together. So many different cultural diasporas in San Francisco have welcomed that and we have seen the benefit of what that does for our own ideas and our own individual communities. So if we start to be able to do that for a world cinema and start to build those bridges and expand its reach and allow it to start to have an influence? What a wonderful mission!
Read the whole interview here.
