I recently got a message from filmmaker Keith Bearden, the director of Meet Monica Velour. He wrote:
Just got back from the Seattle Film Festival, which in a city of 1.5 million fills 500-800 seat theatres for a month with 400 plus films–that’s a huge percentage of the population seeing films that have no publicity, including many that will open in theatres or on pay per view days or weeks later. Even in a very sleepy, tech savvy city with bad parking, they still get people to stand in line for indie, foreign and odd films. Is it because they have created a cultural context for seeing these films, that people are part of a cultural event? Something social that people can talk about before and after, like going to a sports game or rock concert? How does that translate into cinemas in other cities not part of a film festival?
