Page 239 - Alternative Europe Eurotrash and Exploitation Cinema Since 1945

(Cannes, Mifed) and festivals, talk to producers, negotiate with the Belgian distributors. The final
result is always more of a compromise than one initially imagined. So, every year you have to start
again. You may be dealing with the same organisations, but the people may change. You have to
build up trust. Practically each film is a battle on its own, you are completely dependable of the
whims of producer and distributor. Fortunately, after more than twenty years, Brussels has become a
reference and there is hardly a distributor, a few exceptions notwithstanding, with whom we have not
collaborated one time or another. Though with rapidly changing staff policies this is not a guarantee.
What we do have is a firm reputation concerning the reception of the films presented, the very active
and participative role of the audience, which from time to time is used by some professionals as a test
case for their film.
Now, more generally speaking, film festivals operate in the field between art and commerce,
berween specialised film knowledge and commercial interest. That does not necessarily mean that
one has to see a festival as a conflict of interests - commerce versus art, the worthy versus glamour,
economics versus culture. It is just the intertwining of rhese opposites which will, overtly or more
subconsciously, inform the programming and, as such, define the identity of the festival as a
whole. As Janet Harbord points out, film festivals serve a global function in advertising cultural
products, generating information about them and situating a point of information exchange.'' They
are a specific, intense and fleeting happening which generates expectation through its narrative of
premiere screenings, prize winning, competition, different sections and creates a managed site of
specialised knowledge. The organisation of festivals represents a management of cultural resources
in the divisions and demarcations of spheres: of the market, exhibition venues, the criteria of entry,
the categories of award, the creation of sections, the presence of guests or 'stars' and the press office.
These are some of the parameters within which the programming, the choice of films, takes place
and through which a festival tries to create its own distinctiveness. I want to discuss some of these
parameters more in detail.
First of all, there is the basic notion of the premiere. Where first-hand experience is the premium
value of the festival experience, this originality is instilled in the structure of the festival through the
notion of the film premiere. Thus, the screening of a film at a festival is a transitional stage in the life
of the film as commodity before it enters the flow of more dispersed channels of dissemination and
as such the festival generates forms of knowledge prior to the marketing texts of general release.10
This, of course, includes the notion of a festival audience as a kind of a cult, where the spectator gets
a sense of being somehow validated by the film they are the first to discover. Additionally, it often
leads to a competition between festivals, nationally and internationally, where festivals stipulate at
least a national premiere and by extension a world or international premiere as a selection criterion,
which on the one hand reinforces the prestige of the festival and on the other hand restricts the
circulation of the selected films among and between festivals. In order to prevent this sometimes
harsh rivalry, BIFFF was one of the founding members of the European Federation of Fantastic
Film Festivals. Today it counts 14 members from 12 countries and forms a solid network of
festivals, facilitating the circulation of films between its members and establishing itself, through
the organisation of an inter-festival European Méliès Competition, as a tool for the promotion of
the European fantastic film.

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