Universal Cinema Film & TV Journal’s Amir Ganjavie interviewed Chris Clark, Artistic Director of Cinema St. Louis. Their conversation touches on the film selection process and being a smaller regional festival.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Amir Ganjavie, UniversalCinema Magazine (UM): Could you introduce yourself?
Chris Clark (CC): My name is Chris Clark. I’m the longtime artistic director of Cinema St. Louis. For the past 32 years, we have been the presenter of the St. Louis International Film Festival. About 10 years into our existence we changed our name. The original name of the organization was the St. Louis International Film Festival, but we do more than that. We added other events throughout the year. Our events include a classic French film festival, which just had its 16th year, a restoration of classic French films that are older than 25 years.
Our LGBTQ+ film festival called QFest just turned 16 this year also. One of our smaller events, but generous friends make it possible so we do it every year. Our second biggest event, which I’m working on right now, is the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase, which is all local St. Louis area filmmakers. St. Louis is on the border with Illinois so we have a 100-mile or so radius of filmmakers as far west as Columbia, Missouri where the True/False Film Fest is. People move to work in the film industry in New York, Canada, wherever they move. A filmmaker in the local filmmaker’s event who went to the same college I did was living in Spain and did a film about Lucha wrestlers. So you know a wide range of that.
So in addition to all that, if you were not aware, in January of this year, we took a mighty swing and we bought a theater. We are insanely busy doing all those things. It’s a historic theater. It’s 101 years old. It was family owned for the last 45 years and they thought it was time to move on.
So we’re doing a mix of first-run repertory programming, second-runs, first-run films, our own events, rentals, weddings, book launches, and whatever it takes. Then there’s a tiny screen at a separate building at the back that has 48 seats. It’s more like a screening room type venue but it’s a good size for second runs of things. So programming for me means a whole bunch of things, not just the international festival. Now that we took on the theater we’re actually doing theatrical and nontheatrical programming.
(UM): When you’re picking movies, what do you consider a good movie? A movie that you might want for your festival? What is this characteristic?
(CC): That’s a hard question. We want good movies. They come to us in a variety of ways. We’ll just talk mostly about the international festival. It’s what you want to talk about. Our festival’s in November so we end right before Thanksgiving. Right in that sweet spot when all the end-of-the-year Oscar bait movies come out. So we’ll have a handful of those that come from distributors and studios that we work with annually. This will be the 32nd year of the St. Louis International Film Festival. We work with distributors and sales agents domestically and abroad like Film Movement and a lot of sales agents.
And then the biggest pool is submissions. We work with FilmFreeway as our submission portal as do most people in the world these days. There’s others but that’s the primary one. So this year, so far, we have about 2100 submissions total, and we’ve been taking them in since January. We have a lot of different sources where we look at things. What do we want? Films that meet our cultural mission. Films that entertain and teach fresh stories. If there’s six zombie films, for example, submitted in a given year, well, I don’t like zombie films all that much but I wouldn’t pick six, for sure. We have to spread things out.
Things that we know our audience would like. We don’t mandate categories like we have to have this number of this type of film, it doesn’t really work like that for us. We’ll look at everything and look at the available space we have. We have a finite amount of space to be able to do narrative features, documentary features, and then a multitude of documentary shorts programs and narrative shorts programs, all in a limited amount of space so we can only do so many at a time. Films that speak to cross-cultural understanding are important to us. Filmmakers we worked with before, always of interest to have alumni come back. Is it a fresh story that is unique that we think people will want to see?
There’s a lot of romantic comedies, and to stand out in that genre, for example, is difficult. Period pieces are good but is it a period or a time or country that we think a local would latch on to? We’re a multicultural city on many levels, but primarily American, but we do have a lot of immigrants in small numbers. It’s not always practical to assume that a group from Romania will come out to see a Romanian film, so we want to find films that will speak to anybody. It’s just workable. Would the story be interesting to anyone who came in? We reach out to French people or German people or Romanian people in town but would anybody who walked in care about the story? Would they get something out of it? I hope that is helpful.
(UM): What separates your film festival from other film festivals that happen in the US or in your region?
(CC): We know what we are and we know what we are not. What we are not is a big market. We’re not Sundance or Toronto, or a big destination festival like those are. We’re a regional film festival in a mid-sized city. So not thousands of people like who go to Sundance. That’s all they do all day is watch films, and that’s why they’re there, it’s a destination. We don’t have that. We have to compete with their jobs and their lives and their children’s basketball games or dance recitals. People have to really work hard to choose to come to a film, it’s a little bit extra difficult for a regional festival amidst everything else that is going on in the city and the world at the same time.
We have to fight hard to get attention and find the people that would be interested in the Romanian drama, or the French comedy, you know we have to sell the entire festival as a big thing, and then sell all the individual parts. So it’s very difficult in a very short period of time. That’s why we want to make sure that the films that we select are solid on all levels. It doesn’t mean that they have to have the most fanciest tech or big special effects. Have they told a good story? I’m a big reader. I like stories. I like to imagine worlds. Have they shown a world that is concise and coherent from start to finish?
(UM): In terms of quota, do you have any kind of race or gender quota in your festival?
(CC): Not a written down number, but we strive for equity as much as possible. For example, our QFest, our LGBTQ event we had in May, 50% of the participating filmmakers were not men. They were either women or classified in a non-binary way, well that is some equity. We’ve been keeping a harder eye on making sure that we have more women, and more black filmmakers represented, because that’s a big part of our demographic in the city, and in the country. We don’t wanna say we’re gonna have 50% of this or 40% of that, because that’s confining, we want to do both. It’s a delicate balance to try to do both at the same time.
(UM): I read an article in IndieWire a couple of weeks ago about the new films of Polanski or Woody Allen, that they might get distributed in Europe, but not in the US, or in any festival in the US. I’m just curious, how is your relationship with controversial filmmakers like that? Are you separating art from the artists?
(CC): That is a very good and difficult question. We talk about it all the time, separating the artists from art, and that crosses into many other art forms too, but Polanski and Woody Allen, I like both of them in many of their films, as filmmakers. As people, I guess, I’m a little more squeamish about Woody Allen than Roman Polanski even though that was…what happened was not right. It was a different time, and I’m not excusing any of them. It was a different time, and in a very odd situation, and fault was all around. Since then, the woman has forgiven him, and said lots of stuff so that’s considerable. Woody Allen is, that’s a different topic altogether, and the more time goes on, the more we learn. The individual pieces of art that he created, are they separate from the person?
I tend to believe that they should be, but so much of the audience may not. If I were offered a film for the festival by one of them, do we like the film is the first question. Is it something we would program no matter what, despite who it was? And then are we doing it just for the controversy? Just for the attention? No, it has to make sense, or to fit within our programming. We wrestle with that all the time. Where is the line drawn? We know more about those people as they’re famous. Well, there’s probably a lot of terrible people, artists and everything. So it’s the way the world is going and everyone’s finger-pointing and cancel culture.
The way politics is going in the United States, it’s frightening. Who’s in charge of what is right and what is just? Everyone has an opinion, and everyone’s opinion is absolutely right. Everyone else’s is absolutely wrong, and people get angry, and scary, and violent. Art is art. Older films of Woody Allen, I would show surely. I don’t know but they are indelibly etched in cinema history. In the history of great filmmakers in the United States. He’s so prolific.
(UM): What about Russian filmmakers? Are you already accepting films from Russian filmmakers or boycotting them in any way?
(CC): Not boycotting per se, but there’s difficulty in the submission process. Some of the financial channels are, like from Iran, there’s no way through that other than circuitous ways, through interlopers. Expensive people in between mediate to have accounts outside of the country, but they physically cannot pay that. We don’t prevent them from submitting and we would show Russian films, it’s not the artist again, that is the government. The degree of Russian filmmaking and Iranian filmmaking is strong and vital. It is just their financial impediments, and it’s difficult as a medium size nonprofit arts organization to just say, ‘Oh, hey, just submit for free, everybody who wants to.’
We have to think about our time and have to treat it somewhat like a business. So sometimes I do the best I can, and try to offer them a discount, so if they do have to use an expensive somebody in between, it evens itself out. Even that’s not good enough. We do what we can, but inherently no, just because it’s a Russian filmmaker we don’t hate them. That’s not right, and that’s not what we do. We want to promote cross-cultural understanding by the art of the cinema, and by saying something like that, well, we’re just defeating our own purpose.
(UM): In terms of the people who are attending the festival, I realized that in many festivals, they are struggling, they cannot attract the young generation, it’s mostly 40 or people above that age. I’m just curious, how is the situation in your film festival?
(CC): I think that’s universal in the festival world that a lot of the demographic, because ticket prices are a little higher than normal, generally, there’s extra things. And it’s not…they’re not known quantities, so there’s not always big celebrities or stars, and there’s no special effects, and rocket ships, and aliens, and Will Smith there. There’s not always the big things that are inherently attractive to a younger audience, and costs, and people are going to school, they’re making their own films. We try to make things as affordable as possible. We try to offer a wide range of free programs that are available to everyone on any income level but they’re not necessarily the most popular things that we have.
We’ll allow things for free, but they’re not going to be our highest-selling property or big studio title, we can’t offer that for free. We do what we can and try to offer student price incentives. We have a range of ages and attitudes and sexes and genders and ethnicities on our various programming committees. We try to listen to a variety of voices to do that, and in some ways, that’s what we foster with the St. Louis Filmmakers Showcase, a local filmmakers’ event. Which is predominantly younger filmmakers and students who we’ll invite a number of their films on to screen in the bigger festival.
(UM): In terms of celebrities and stars, are you bringing celebrities?
(CC): Well they’re always invited but it doesn’t mean they wish to come or if they want a big huge fee, we would never be able to pay that. We don’t have a lot of ‘stars’, or ‘celebrities’ but we do have annually 150 to 200 guests filmmakers in attendance, they’re just not big names. There’ll be one or two bigger or big names per year depending on circumstances. John Goodman, for example, is from St. Louis so he’s been a guest before. A long time ago Kevin Kline was our guest because he grew up here, things like that.
I know that Alexander Payne, the director of Nebraska, we’ve been talking to him back and forth for years about making an appearance. He got really close last year and we even bought him a plane ticket, but something came up, so he couldn’t make it and had to cancel last minute, but he’s gonna keep his promise. He’s coming this year so he’ll be one of our guests. We do have a lot of guests, and lots of q&a’s, and discussions just not with somebody that everybody in the world knows. We’re not that type of event or budget or destination for that, but they’re always welcome. Sometimes things work out.
(UM): I know that the venue is a big challenge for many film festivals, sometimes they’re very scattered. Do you have access to good venues?
(CC): We have a number of longtime partners. We’ve never had our own space ever. We’ve always been renting or leasing or borrowing or whatever, in a variety of spaces, but a lot of times the same ones over and over again. Our main venue for the last, most of the last 30 years, was sold to a church during the pandemic. It was three screens, and it was one of the indie art houses in town. It had a big main theater and two smaller theaters, so it was a huge blow to us when it was no longer available. But since then, we found some other partners. So it’ll be on 8 to 10 screens during the festival, not every single night. We partnered with two local universities, Webster University where I graduated from, and Washington University, and do programs mostly on weekends there. And then we own a space now, it has two screens. And we’re gonna be leasing space, a couple screens each in two other local commercial venues to make it all fit.
(UM): Did COVID in any way impact the festival in the long run? I’m asking this question because some festivals right now are hybrid. They have online and live screenings both together, so I’m just curious, does it happen at your festival? Or how is the structure of your festival right now? Is it hybrid or only live screenings?
(CC): At this point, we have all but abandoned online or hybrid screenings. We had some successes, particularly when everybody was stuck at home. But towards the end of quarantine, and after that, we tried a number of hybrid events across the board all throughout the year, and the success rate just evaporated almost completely. There was very little interest or attention at the end. I really thought that we would keep this model going longer, but nobody would participate, and we lost money on it. So we had to reluctantly for all practical purposes give it up for the most part.
(UM): What is your vision for the future of the festival? Suppose in 10 years, do you have a utopian dream for your festival?
(CC): We’ve had a very small staff for a long time. We want to bring on more programmers or co-programmers that can spread out ages and ethnicities and genders so that it’s not just the same people doing the same stuff all again. We want fresh voices in that as well. We’ll still be just as busy because we’re also programming a theater so we can’t do everything. We’ve been a very small staff for a long time.
But now that we’re property owners, we have to be bigger. It’s been rough these past seven months doing everything. We’re building our staff and we want to be an arthouse destination all throughout the year, which would dovetail nicely into the types of films we present during the international festivals, so it’s a great way to promote ourselves and our permanent home, and keep our name out there with a great beautiful marquee. It’s a beautiful theater, and everyone knows it, loves it. We’re very fortunate.
© 2020-2023. UniversalCinema Mag.