During the Red Sea International Film Festival (Red Sea IFF) Universal Cinema Film & TV Journal’s Amir Ganjavie was able to interview Harris Dew, the Senior Vice President and General Manager of the IFC Center, the five-screen arthouse cinema in Greenwich Village, NYC open since 2005.
Amir Ganjavie, UniversalCinema Magazine (UM): Can you start by telling us a little more about your theater and your work?
Harris Dew (HD): IFC Center is a 5-screen arthouse in New York City’s Greenwich Village neighborhood. Wepresent American independent and international films and documentaries to New Yorkers every day of the year. We do first-run films, but also retrospectives and revivals of newly restored films. We also present DOC NYC, which is the United States’ biggest documentary festival, every November.
(UM): When you say that you are presenting mostly independent films, how do you define independent?
(HD): We are an independent cinema—meaning that we’re showcasing films and movies that are produced outside of a major studio. And typically those big studios will book their titles at a chain theater. They’ll book hundreds of cinemas across the country, dozens and dozens in just a region. Whereas IFC Center is more likely to play a film and be the only screen in all of New York City, or Manhattan, to have that film. It’s a curated and unique movie-going experience for our members and audiences, and a hub for those seeking out the best in independent cinema.
(UM): For example, will you screen a movie like Anatomy of Fall?
(HD): Yes, that’s a movie we’d screen. Every theater has its own sort of identity and ethos. Some theaters that are independent might focus more on festival titles and discoveries. We do a broader range, so we might have films that are very well-known or that have a more established profile coming out of festivals, as well as films that are still unknown to larger audiences.
(UM): So, would you consider Killers of The Flower Moon independent?
HD: No, because it’s being distributed by Paramount. I work with Paramount for their library, and we do showcase a lot of classic films from their catalog, but no first-run films. For example, every year we present It’s a Wonderful Life for two or three weeks around the holiday time and that’s one of their films.
(UM): In general, are you discovering films or you are looking for films that have already had success at the festivals?
(HD): It’s a little bit of both. Success, profile, or press from festivals is helpful. Sometimes we’ll see films that haven’t had their festival release yet and seem like good fits for us, for our audience. Sometimes it might be because the story takes place in a certain type of milieu, or that is about a band that’s very popular with people who are in the demographic that come to our cinema. Something like that. Or it might be a film that’s by a local filmmaker who I know has a following.
(UM): What I heard is very unique about New York is that most of the films, even when you are programming something from 50 or 60 years ago will be full or sold out. It seems like there is a very specific culture in New York.
(HD): Yes, I think we’re very lucky in New York. We have a passionate audience who’s very excited and takes a lot of risks. It’s also the biggest city in the US with the greatest number of people, so we’re lucky in that way too. I also think it’s just a good movie-going town. It always has been. Some cities have a stronger cinema culture and some have a not-so-strong cinema culture. Paris has a very, very strong cinema culture. New York has a very strong cinema culture. I can’t tell you why that is, I just can tell you where.
(UM): I heard Woody Allen received a US distributor for Coup de Chance, what is your relationship with filmmakers that have been “canceled”, will you consider screening them?
(HD): It would really depend on the film.
(UM): What about countries like, for example, Russia? Do you have a kind of political stance to show or not show—
(HD): No. Again, I think, we try and look at every film and let the filmmaking speak for itself. There are a lot of filmmakers in different political systems who are working within and sometimes against those systems at the same time. Sometimes that produces some really interesting work, and I think those are all worth considering. There’s nothing that I would automatically reject.
(UM): Do you have any quotas when you are programming films?
(HD): No. We are a for-profit cinema. Ultimately, we want audiences to come and buy tickets to our films and special programming. We have a lot of annual programs that are quite popular. We present the Oscar-nominated short films program. It’s a very short window of time because they get released two or three weeks after the nominations are announced and then they play in theaters until the ceremony, but there’s very intense interest. It’s always a very big and important program for us, and we get great audiences and a lot of people who come to our cinema for the first time to see that program. Every year we also play It’s a Wonderful Life, that’s a tradition for us. We’ve been doing it for 15 years. We play midnight movies every weekend, so every week you can find horror, genre, cult classics, and crazy out-there films playing late-night on Fridays and Saturdays with us.
(UM): I see several festivals running at your location venues. How does that work?
(HD): It works a little differently for every festival. DOC NYC is the annual documentary festival that we create and produce. Then there’s another festival called the Human Rights Watch Film Festival that’s organized by the Human Rights Watch organization, and we’re more of a venue for them. We are a long-term partner, but it’s their programming and they bring us the slate of films they want to present. We talk through things like the size of the program and the scheduling with us, but they’re the ones deciding on what to show and bringing in the filmmakers. That’s the case for a few other festivals too.
We’ve done a new Japanese film showcase for the last couple of years, and we’ve been the host for that. I’m happy to partner with them because I think it’s always good to have a showcase of new cinema that otherwise our audiences might not get to see. But I was relying on their expertise to organize that program.
(UM): I realize the cost of theater rental in New York is very high. It’s not easy to secure a good location. I’m curious, do you have any kind of a special promotion for festivals or independent filmmakers?
(HD): Not necessarily. It depends on what’s happening. We don’t want to do a festival that we don’t believe is a good program, or one that doesn’t make sense for our audience or for our identity. We take our best guess on what’s going to work for us and on what we’re going to be able to help generate interest for and draw audiences to. I think the sign that the Human Rights Watch comes back year after year and that the Japanese Showcase came back for a second year (it’s two years old), shows that our collaboration has worked for them. But every festival has a different measure of success. For some festivals, it’s about discovering and launching new voices, and that’s the primary thing. Other festivals might be more community-focused, or only showcase a specific genre. I think for our documentary festival, we try to accomplish a few things. Documentary is a very fertile field right now, and there are a lot of different types of documentaries getting made. New York City is a center of the documentary world for the US, so there are many NYC-based filmmakers making a wide variety of documentary work. That creates a strong need for a showcase to be able to shine a spotlight on those films.
Red Sea IFF’s got a lot of interesting different things it’s trying to achieve, right?
(UM): Yeah.
(HD): They seem to be trying to showcase, highlight, and bring attention to films from the region, but also bring in an international selection of films from around the world that have played other festivals that otherwise might not get a chance to play here. Then there’s the whole Souk as well, which is trying to foster and grow the production community. I think they’ll impact the industry in a lot of ways. I think they’re doing a really interesting job of it. It’s impressive.
(UM): So, my understanding is that when you are giving your venue to a festival, you’ll also help them in terms of promotion. You want to make sure that they will have a good selection and they will have enough audience.
(HD): Yes, exactly. It can vary festival by festival. Sometimes people are bringing to us a fully formed idea. Human Rights Watch, for example, presents a version in New York then they present slightly different versions in other cities in the US, but they have a very concrete and strong idea of the types of films they’re going to show, the types of promotions they want to do, and the types of communities they’re trying to reach out to. So we help out with that, but they have the concept already.
(UM): So, you will promote them also if you can through your mailing list and social media?
(HD): Absolutely. We have a large number of email subscribers and we send out a weekly newsletter to them. We have social media that we use very actively, Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. All of those are important to us in reaching our audiences. And we track which tools are effective for which types of film.
(UM): I see that most arthouse movies or independents are attended by people over forty. They have difficulty attracting young people to some venues. I wonder is that your situation?
(HD): One of the big things that we’ve discovered post-pandemic is that the audience has changed a lot. For us, the audience is becoming noticeably younger. I’ve been in the business for a long time, and I think for a long time Americans thought that American audiences sort of conceived non-English language films as a genre, right?
(UM): Yeah.
(HD): Americans had a very stereotypical idea of what a foreign language film was because the types of foreign language films that were distributed in arthouses were a lot of dramas, a lot of prestige-type pictures. I think younger audiences now understand that language and genre are independent of each other. If they’re interested in horror, they’re going to be interested in a horror film in Korean or a horror film in Hindi, etc. If they’re interested in a dark comedy about a young woman fighting with her family, if it’s an Italian, it’s not going to be a turnoff to them. That’s been a really exciting development to see in the last few years for me. I think we’re seeing firsthand a younger audience that’s interested in a wider variety of films than I think we used to have.
(UM): I see that when there is a program at your center it has been discussed by outlets, like, for example, Film Comment. Is there a close connection between you and New York outlets?
(HD): We will do our own outreach to the press, and a lot of times films will have a publicist attached too, and we’ll work in collaboration with them. Typically, in the US, most arthouse films, launch in New York first, or New York and Los Angeles, and then other cities in the country. Part of that’s because there’s so much more press in New York and Los Angeles, and because the internet and social media used to have a longer lag time between press coverage. You’d get something in New York and then it would open a week later in Chicago, but people in Chicago would’ve heard a little bit about it from New York. Now, the New York reviews come out and they’re sort of online and everyone reads them everywhere, so it goes faster.
But, the way films themselves are delivered has changed too. We’re no longer shipping prints around the country. It’s a much faster service now. More and more films are getting delivered purely digitally without any kind of physical media at all. It’s a lot faster in a lot of ways and a lot less expensive than it used to be.
(UM): You mentioned, interestingly, that after COVID you realized that the population who are coming has changed, becoming younger. But what about the number, has that increased or decreased?
(HD): I can speak specifically about New York City. New York City cinemas were closed for almost a full year, from March 2020 to February 2021. When we reopened, we were only able to reopen, like in a lot of places, with reduced capacity of just 50%, and health authorities only slowly allowed us to return to 100% capacity. Necessarily, our numbers were very low for a while, but they’re coming back up. We’re still not quite where we were in 2019, but 2022 was much better than 2021 and 2023 is doing a lot better than 2022, so the trend is good.
(UM): When I have conversations with people who are involved in this business, many of them told me about the insecurity of the job. I’m just curious, how is the situation at your center? Because is it a full-time job for the programmer? Do you program?
(HD): We have a full-time administrative staff that does most of the programming, marketing and administrative work. The folks who work directly with customers, like the theater managers and ushers, are a mix of full-time and part-time. We are part of a larger parent company called AMC Networks, who provides us support and resources in a lot of areas too.
(UM): What are the major festivals that are very important for you as the US?
(HD): The three biggest I’d say are Cannes, Sundance, and Toronto for different reasons, but those have sort of been my big three for a long time. Each of them has a very different profile and comes at a very different point in the calendar. We always end up having a lot of films that have gone to one of those festivals.
(UM): And what is your relationship like with streamers?
(HD): As part of AMC Networks’ film group, we work closely with IFC Films, RLJE and streamers like Shudder and AMC+. One of the great things about IFC Films is they were the first to pioneer the day and date model, which opens a film in theaters and on streaming the same day. IFC Films changed the way they were releasing films, knowing that if audiences want to see something in a theater, they’re going to go to a theater and that activity is very different from someone who wants to stream a film at home. That availability at home isn’t automatically going to dampen the interest in seeing it in a theater. A lot of the larger chains will require the films they play to have a certain theatrical-only window before streaming. IFC Center doesn’t require that and we’re happy to work with distributors that are simultaneously doing some sort of streaming.
(UM): Is there anything else you’d like to add?
(HD): I think the other post-pandemic thing that’s been interesting, and maybe it started even before the pandemic, is a real rise in interest in genre films. And there’s a lot more crossover between the arthouse and genre spaces. The company Shudder is part of AMC Networks’ Film Group, and they’ve established a great brand for their audience. They’re trusted by people who are into horror. We’ve been working more and more with them to do special screenings of their films that aren’t necessarily going to have a full theatrical release– a series of sneak previews/in-person screenings in New York called Shudder Showcase, and those have been great. They’ve been very successful and audiences get excited about them.
I think the thing I always come back to is that people want a reason to go to the theater and they want to know that the experience they’re going to have is exciting and powerful. For a lot of people, horror is that experience. It’s so much more intense to experience it with other people around you.
(UM): Or laughing, like a comedy.
(HD): Yeah. Or a comedy. Something you want to see on a big screen that’s going to transport you, completely enrapture you, or scare you out of your skin. These are all great things to experience in a theater, so that’s always what we’re looking for.
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