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New York Flooded with Festivals

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In a city where anything's possible and everything's available, film festivals are quickly climbing the list when it comes to catering to specialty audiences. Reuters says there are over fifty fests in the city, most of them springing up in the last decade.

Why the influx of festivals? Location, for one. Festivals, by definition, provide audiences to films that most likely won't make it to theaters. If filmmakers are in New York, where better to draw audiences than in one's own backyard?

The other explanation is diversity. Undoubtedly the most diverse city in the country, New York hosts four African-American themed festivals, two Asian-American, a Turkish, and a Russian, among several others.

And if there are so many festivals right in NYC, why do buyers and filmmakers clamor to Sundance, Toronto and Cannes? That lies in the objective of your film festival, of course. If you're in it to create a market--to encourage wheeling and dealing and putting films in theaters--that's decidedly different from the festivals whose objective is simply to bring movies to movie-goers. Tribeca is where the deals happen; the Brooklyn Underground Film Festival is where you'll catch a purely independent short made with more heart than any blockbuster.

Of the festival overload, the article asks "Is this good for the New York film industry and film lovers, or just sensory overload?"

I say I wish I lived in New York.

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Posted by Lisa on June 21, 2006 04:57 PM
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