The Lost Programme
September 2020
Two months after this year’s festival was due to happen, and I was due to be hosting my first ever programmes there, the festival has been cancelled. How an event can be cancelled two months after it was due to take place, is one of those strange logics that we are very accustomed to these days.
I have taken several attempts at writing up this blog, and I’ll admit that the cancellation and the upcoming London Film Festival have driven me to commit to these words & publish. I first attempted to write something on my programme back in April; I had just finished putting the programmes together, in full knowledge that the festival had been postponed and these films would at best be sitting in a spreadsheet for a few months. The original title for this blog was ‘Thinking Through Short Films’ and I’ve included the best bit below, as my feelings have apparently changed very little in the course of this lockdown:
“Re-watching some shorts I selected for a postponed festival, while in lockdown, has illuminated some of my favourite things about short films, and their ability to capture so much in so little time, to be highly specific and still universal. A film I loved for many reasons months ago, now stings in a different way because of the current context of pandemic and lockdown. I want to see what new things emerge, to see how an audience reacts to them all and having no definite screening date for them is incredibly frustrating. I have always programmed with a deadline and in fact like most things in life, have found it incredibly hard to deliver any work without a fixed end goal. So programming for an unknown ending creates a tricky challenge for me. But especially as I feel the curatorial ownership for these films, they have become outposts of my identity and sparks of possible futures or connections within an already isolating film community – and to have them denied the space to screen and grow and expand with an audience presence just hurts in a weird way.”
Programming this festival was very much the dream job for me. While the work was hard and there was a good deal of learning on the job, I enjoyed my time spent with these films, and not having a screening or an opportunity to share the films, makes all my work feel unfinished. This blog is an attempt to create some kind of ending for the work, to create a space for my thoughts on the films and in a small way share these fantastic films with the world. The films themselves are still finding screenings at non-cancelled festivals, both online and in cinemas! I’m so happy for everyone who gets to see these films, even if they aren’t in my programmes.
I know that at some point they will all make their way onto public digital platforms, so maybe if you check back on this post in a year or so, you will find the full programme available to watch (if I remember to update it!) and then maybe this doesn’t have to be an ending anymore.
There are six programmes in total, looking at care, environments, identity, life and just stuff. I led with my instincts as much as I could, trusting in my ingrained practice of positive bias as well as keeping an eye on statistics gleaned from information shared on filmfreeway (I won’t publish the stats because of the ethics of that, but if you’re in the industry and want to know more about them, hmu!). I programmed with the help of a team of submissions viewers, a superb admin team, a mighty google spreadsheet and a selection of teeny pieces of coloured paper blu-tacked to a big sheet of sugar paper. At a certain point I scrawled some rhetorical questions on this piece of paper:
“What are short films for? Who are short films for? Best examples of short format? Duty of care to audience. Quality vs. Energy”
And the following six programmes were blu-tacked underneath them.
(NB: I’ve decided to revert back to the working titles for my programmes, as the ones I selected to go to print in a brochure don’t really mean anything to me.)