Berlinale and Clermont review
19. Feb 2009 13:42As said before, rathershort went to the Clermont-Ferrand filmfest a while ago. To describe it in short: a fantastic audience for shortfilm and a great film market.
We arrived on early Saturday morning, when the festival had just started with its opening ceremony the evening before. Since the film market did not open before Monday we went straigt to the movies - the festival screens films in the International Competition, the French Competition and many smaller side series. The main cinema is located at the maison de la culture neear the center and it's just huge - arround 1400 people watching shortfilms is a scene you don't get to see very often, especially when this cinema is sold out through the whole week as well as most of the other venues.
We went only to International Comeptitions, mostly because of English subtitles not being available for the other screenings, even some of the international screenings did only have French subtitles - weird for an international festival of this size.
The quality of films presented had a wide range from perfect masterpieces im 35mm to first year in filmschool clips shot on DV - maybe this is a result of the approach to show films from as many countries as possible - but sometimes it was just annoying. Especially cause the majority of seleceted films was at least 10-15min in lenght.Nevertheless we had some highlights and hopefully we can present some very soon on rathershort.
A very good idea in my opinion is the morning press conference with filmmakers of premiered films screened the day before. It would be even better if translation was not to French but to English...
In general it was big fun just to watch good movies with a great crowd - the festival itselfs lacks some things that are provided elsewhere, like a common meeting place, a lounge or a bar to meet filmmakers and fans or free wireless internet to name a few. The most interesting part for us started when the film market opened - we had already scheduled lots of meetings with sales agencies, film festivals, film schools and national film institutes before and so the following days were very busy. We introduced rathershort.com to many people with the aim of finding new cooperations and birning more films onto the site, of course.
We had interesting talks to people from all over the world, from Mexico to India, from Japan to Romania (greetings to Vlad & Co!). Ever day starting at 5pm some stands started happy ours or little fingerfood parties, so it was easy to meet people and get in touch with each other. The film marked itself was located in a hall normally used for sports and it was definitely the right size, but of course crowded during the days - after 3 days of talking you definitely need a break then.
Our break meant going back to Berlin, Micha and me were working for the Berlinale Talent Campus, keeping the website running and taking care of local systems showing the participants works and offer netoworking possibilities - very interesting to work with 350 people from more than 100 countries =)
We also found the time to go to the European Film Market several times, one of the biggest feature film markets world wide. We met some of the people we talked to in Clermont already again and found a lot new contacts and information also related to the shortfilm business. After our job was done on last Thursday, we attended numerous screenings and came back to fulltime rathershort work this Monday..
Now we are getting back to all the filmmakers and companies we met during the last two weeks and we are optimistic that results can be seen in a while on rathershort.com =)
A big THANK YOU to ALEX and MARIE for being great hosts in Clermont-Ferrand - we are looking forward to seeing you in Clermont next year at the very latest, but hopefully before in Berlin!