Festival Envy

Telluride. Toronto. Venice. Cannes. Berlin. Simple place names to some, but to a film nerd they're so much more. When I was younger and unaware of how the cinema world worked, I always marveled over how movie reviewers and journalists managed to see all those prestige pictures that came out in the last few weeks of the year, and had their top ten lists compiled right at the beginning of January. Often, the lists would have impossibly obscure foreign pictures that couldn't have played more than a few cities, and yet all the major critics had seen them somehow and were discussing titles months in advance of when they became available to the masses. The secret was the film festivals, gatherings of the cinema elite in beautiful cities across Europe and the United States where artsy and not-so-artsy films could premiere with a splash and start building up buzz.

I've developed an awful case of festival envy. "Black Swan" premiered at Toronto a week ago, putting director Darren Aronofsky and his leading ladies firmly in the running for year-end awards contention. Over the weekend, Sofia Coppola's "Somewhere" picked up a Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, and may have muscled its way back into the Oscar race despite being written off by several prognosticators earlier this month. Or maybe the Venice jury, led by Coppola's former beau Quentin Tarantino was biased in her favor. I wish I could weigh in on the controversy myself, but alas the domestic release date of "Somewhere" isn't until December. So I'm left daydreaming about dashing around Venice or Cannes, marathoning screenings of pretentious movies and catching glimpses of Vincent Cassel and Wong Kar-Wai.

And of course there's the fun of being around a lot of cinephiles who will not only sit through these films willingly, but anticipate them and want to talk about them. All the rumors of Oscar winners being decided in advance by a tiny cabal of mysterious people is true, you know. They're the film nerds and critics and buyers and industry folk who go to these festivals and preview these films, the people who help to pare down the thousands of pictures that get made every year to the handful that studios spend millions promoting and cineplexes grudgingly turn their screens over to in January. As studio output becomes more conservative and risk-averse, the independent films like Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" and Danny Boyle's "Slumdog Millionaire" have dominated. Boyle is in Toronto right now with his latest, "127 Hours," a survival thriller with James Franco that is getting lots of attention.

It isn't just the ability to get an early peek at highly anticipated films that makes me envious of festival-goers. There are some films that never get picked up for distribution and never screen anywhere else. Festivals for indie films like Sundance and South by Southwest operate as markets for hopeful filmmakers trying to get their completed films picked up for wider distribution. But in other cases, especially with many foreign and more experimental films, there's no market for the work and thus no way that many titles are going to find their way to audiences through conventional channels. It came as something of a shock to realize how many films never get domestic distribution at all. During my otaku days, one of the biggest events for the anime fandom was Disney agreeing to release the back catalog of Studio Ghibli's movies direct-to-video. There are still dozens of films I want to see that I have no access to without importing them from overseas and buying myself a region free DVD player.

I live in a major metropolitan area that has plenty of art house theaters, several museums and institutions that do special film screenings, and a couple of smaller film festivals. There's nothing on the level of Toronto, but we do get a good number of domestic premieres of foreign films and I've been able to see a lot of movies I otherwise would have never been able to. Also, I'm overseas quite a bit so I do end up watching a lot of Asian films before they hit they hit the U.S., such as Zhang Yimou costume epics and various anime features. Once in a while, I'll even stumble across American films that, for whatever reason, end up opening in other countries first, such as the long-delayed "I Love You Phillip Morris." So I count myself luckier than most as far as access to varied theatrical experiences is concerned, but I still can't help being impatient to see "Black Swan" and "Somewhere" and all the rest of the films that are currently being talked up on the festival circuit.

I want to be part of the secret cabal - or just sit in on the meetings.