by Eric Kohn
At the beginning of this month, Arts Engine, a New York-based media company focused on documentaries with social relevance, launched its annual Media That Matters Film Festival, which it touts as "one of the world's first and largest online film festivals." More than that, the festival is incredibly effective at achieving what it sets out to do: Gathering submissions of short films with activist slants, it allows viewers to watch the entries and immediately support the causes behind their existence with "Take Action Now" tools accompanying the films.
Unlike the standard festival circuit, the Media Matters Film Festival continues to play an active role in the lives of the films it supports, all the way up to a DVD collection that will be released later this year. The festival operates under leadership of Arts Engine founder Katy Chevigny, a documentarian whose latest feature, Election Day, hits cable and DVD on July 1. She spoke to Stream about the history of the festival and how it has evolved over the years.
You've been running an online film festival since for seven years. That's actually a long time ago when you consider the history of online video. How have things changed for online festivals since then?
2001 was really the early days of watching stuff online. It wasn't really until 2005 -- or really 2006 -- that there were a number of people watching videos online. When we first did the festival, we were trying to be forward-thinking about where video was heading, and we wanted to take advantage of the connectivity the internet offered in terms of ideas. The point of the festival was to show social issues films online. Now, it seems so ho-hum that we're on the internet, but at the time, it was really a concept. There were very few platforms for short films, other than some film festivals. It was just an archaic form. YouTube really changed the whole concept of how short videos play in our culture.
Did the online video boom following the birth of YouTube make it easier for you to get interest in your festival?
We were trying to figure out what was happening so we could ride the wave and not be overwhelmed by it. People started watching our videos online in addition to watching YouTube. They got used to the concept of watching video online, and then, pretty immediately, there was a feeling of, "How do you I figure out what's worth watching online?" That was when the curation of video online became a value. YouTube actually helped drive traffic to us. We get about 500 submissions and pick the top twelve or fifteen among those and showcase. So we became a destination for many video viewers because they wanted to see something from somebody who had already plowed through short content and picked stuff.
Do you get the sense that a lot of the filmmakers with work in the Media That Matters film festival want to cultivate careers making shorts?
There is definitely a variety of people. We certainly have some people who use the short film format as a stepping stone towards the larger ways of making film. The short film format is very effective now. It takes a long time to make a documentary film. I think that's a trend: People using the short doc as a way of letting people know their project is out there. In terms of people making careers out of short films, I don't think the economy supports anyone doing that right now. At least, it's not common.
And yet the amount of exposure of filmmaker can get from one short is unprecedented.
Yes, but it's the long tail, like with bloggers. The vast majority of filmmakers aren't getting their shorts noticed. The promise of it is great, but if we're talking about the extent to which it helps most filmmakers, it's not that large of an audience. We had a lot of success with our 2006 film festival with a short called A Girl Like Me. It was made by a sixteen year old in Harlem. It's basically herself at daycare center in Harlem, where she basically did a DIY experiment with young children and race. She videotaped how children in a daycare responded to "The Doll Test," the difference between a black doll and a white doll, which goes back to Brown v. Board of Education. It's really incredible investigative reporting footage. We sent it into our festival, which is when it first got out. Then, all these bloggers picked it up and wrote about it. This was basically the first year we had people e-mailing each other the video. It kind of exploded. She was featured on CNN, which was followed by an appearance on Oprah. Prior to the internet, there was no way a sixteen-year-old could make a short form video with a handheld camera and have somebody like Oprah Winfrey hear about it. There was no method for that opportunity.
How long do you stay involved with the films in the festival?
Somebody said that we shouldn't really call ourselves a festival, because a festival happens, and then it's over. It's really more like a fellowship or an artist residency. It's never over. We spend twelve months supporting the filmmakers, and the causes they made their films about, and taking their films all over the country and the world. We make DVDs. It's a multiplatform festival. It's online, in theaters, in schools and on DVD. We want every kind of access possible to spread the word about what these films have to say.
How do you handle the technical side of things?
We use Withoutabox for submissions. There are quite a lot of online film festivals. As with any curated website, it takes awhile to build up a reputation. One of the advantages we have is that we've been doing it for so long that we've built up an audience and a teachers who follow our site. They're looking forward to seeing what we have this year. We leverage a lot of mainstream platforms for online video. We had a presence on YouTube starting when it started. We were one of the first Google video channels. We used that to keep our servers from crashing when we had A Girl Like Me, which sent a lot of viewers to our site.
Do you notice any trends in the submissions?
One of the things about curating this festival is that you're actually seeing what people care about. For example, after Katrina, we were seeing a lot of films about Katrina. Now we're seeing a lot of films from young people about the war in Iraq. So we do try to include the issues that seem to be the things people are most concerned about now.
Since all the films involved are considered "issue" films, how do you define that word?
The nice thing about curation is that you're taking a lot of things into account: a set of films that work together for a multitude of purposes. It's really an art. Every year, we assemble a different jury who evaluate the films and help us come to a conclusion about what makes the most sense. We don't have categories, with the exception of things you can't put on the internet anyway. We respond to the quality of the work and the argument the artist is making. We try to have some films from young people, some animated films, documentaries, comedies, international...We're looking to get people excited about the variety as much as anything else.