Universal Cinema Film & TV Journal’s Amir Ganjavie interviewed Jonathan Kieran, programming director for the Atlanta Film Society. Their conversation touches on the selection process, looking for unseen films that deserve to be seen, and helping filmmakers from sanctioned countries.
This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
Amir Ganjavie, UniversalCinema Magazine (UM): Can you introduce yourself and tell me about your role in your organization?
Jonathan Kieran (JK): My name is Jonathan Kieran. I’m the programming director at the Atlanta Film Society. We’re based in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, and we are the presenting organization of the Atlanta Film Festival.
(UM): How is the selection process at the Atlanta Film Festival? Do you have programmers who are working with you in different areas?
(JK): We are really reliant on blind submissions from filmmakers, that’s our main source of programming. We do everything through FilmFreeway. I believe it’s usually somewhere around 95% of our programs. We program about 150 films. Filmmakers from all over the world sending us their films. And then we work for about 6 months of the year to make sure all those are screened and considered, and then eventually turned into a selected program.
In terms of the size of our team, I work directly with two staff programmers who are on the staff of the Atlanta Film Society. So they work with me year round to do the festival and to execute other programming that we do here. And then we work with about a dozen contractors, folks that are with us seasonally that jump in and help us assess our submissions. On the film side, last year we got just over 7000 film submissions, so it’s quite a lot of work. We do want to make sure that everybody that submits to us, that their film is given due consideration. So to do that we need to bring on some seasonal help, but the core of the team is me and two staff programmers.
(UM): I imagine that’s 7000 submissions for both short and feature films. You program both short and feature?
(JK): That’s correct. Yes. We program in narrative features, narrative shorts, doc features, doc shorts. And then we also have some categories like experimental, we do animated shorts. That’s an Oscar qualifying category for us, along with doc shorts and narrative shorts. We also do episodic music videos, some experimental, if I didn’t say that already, and virtual reality as well. So we have quite a spread.
(UM): What kind of movies are you looking for mostly?
(JK): We’re not a very specialist festival. We do tend to be pretty general, especially in terms of genre. We do tend to program work that might not be seen otherwise, that might not be playing at a lot of other festivals. That really excites us when we see a film that we really like, but that hasn’t played everywhere yet. We get a little bit weird. It’s not our only thing but what I found here is that there’s a pretty big audience for cult films and strange films. So, there’s really nothing too weird for us. The weirder we program, the audience really seems to follow us in that direction. Just to speak of our narrative features programming, this past year in April, we programmed some international drama, more like art house sort of things, some independent films. We had an independent horror film called The Angry Black Girl and Her Monster, which is just now getting distributed. That was shot in North Carolina, so in our neck of the woods. I think what unites all of that is we want to discover new voices and new films. We’re really drawn to things that are original and surprising. So, that’s how I kind of map out our programming.
(UM): How much of your percentage is from the US and how much is international? Are you mostly US centered or international?
(JK): I’m sure that the majority of what we get in submissions is from the US. We are a US festival and I think that’s where we have the most reach and that’s where people are the most aware of us. I don’t know if I could tell you in terms of our program breakdown, I don’t have that number at hand. But I would say it is majority United States, but definitely not exclusive to the United States. We program a lot of Georgia filmmakers. There’s a really big community of filmmakers, not just in Atlanta, but around the state of Georgia, the production hotbed in the past decade or so. Like commercial production, feature films, they get shot here all the time. That has begun to really create a real bed of filmmaking talent. So about 25% of our films came from right here in Georgia and that’s definitely a flag we like to fly. But internationally, I would say it’s probably in the 30% to 40% range, if I had to guess, but that’s just off the top of my head. United States is the biggest presence there, but we get films from around the world. We program from around the world.
(UM): Do you invite films like art house films or from other film festivals that you are seeing?
(JK): Typically, we invite a handful of films. I would say up to maybe 20 films, typically features that are just our marquee films. Usually, things that already got distribution or on their way. We’re in April, so we’re hot on the heels of Sundance and South by Southwest. I think probably any year, we’ve programmed a few films that have come through, one or both of those festivals. This year, one of our larger feature films was It’s Only Life After All, which is a documentary about the Indigo Girls, the musicians who are from Atlanta. So that was a Sundance film that we programmed and I think maybe Kokomo City, as well. So we do a little bit of that but that’s like two different things. It is very heavily weighted towards the submission side, in terms of numbers.
(UM): I’ve heard that if a filmmaker first find a distributor and go to a festival, he has a better chance, because festivals will take him more seriously. I wonder if this is the case in your festival?
(JK): I don’t think it is the case for us. I would say if somebody has a distributor attached, I wouldn’t say it would destroy their chances of getting into our festival, but I will say the way that plays into our calculus, is if we look at something that’s been picked up by a distributor, especially if it’s a distributor that we know is going to be giving it a big theatrical run within the next couple months. Sometimes we would say like, well, this film is kind of on its way. Like it doesn’t really need our platform specifically. It’s not the only consideration, but whenever we’re making a programming decision, we always try to think about what is the platform that we’re giving to this film and how can that film make the best use of it, right?
Like a local film from Georgia that has played nowhere and maybe has just finished and had zero budget, that of course, we’re giving them a big boost. Other films that have played around the festival circuit already, we might not be the biggest stop for them on their festival circuit. But for a film that has distribution already in hand, it’s not really a factor for us. And I would say in some cases, we might, if we had a choice between two films, one of which hadn’t been distributed yet and one of which already had distribution, we might say, “Well, why don’t we try to give this undistributed film a little extra exposure?”
(UM): You worked before in New Orleans. I know that New Orleans is very geared to supporting marginalized filmmakers, so they have a policy about it. Do you have any policy like that at your festival?
(JK): No. It’s more of a practice than a policy. You are correct, yes. Working in New Orleans, they’ve come out really publicly and they’ve sort of stated like, here are our programming values. That’s certainly something that I really admire, their forthrightness and being willing to get into that conversation with filmmakers. We have not taken that step, like I said, we do program. I’m not sure, I haven’t looked at New Orleans’s numbers in terms of their diversity stats in their program, but I believe we’re probably on par with them. I do think that’s important, coming up out of that environment that was always part of my work in New Orleans. And also we’re both regional festivals in the southern United States.
We’re both working in diverse cities that are impacted in an outsized way by policies and things that happen in America. I guess I would say that the South… I’m not from the Southern US, I’m from New England in the Northeast, but I’ve lived in the South for over 10 years at this point. It really is where the rubber meets the road, so to speak. I feel like when politicians make mistakes and then you put policies into place, these are some of the places where they hurt first and more badly. I don’t know if that makes sense. When I think about programming a diverse festival, that’s what comes to mind. I admire my old boss and the folks in New Orleans who are leading the way. I’m very happy to be in that camp with them of programming with an eye to diversity. I should that for the 2023 festival, ATLFF’s program came around 50% from female and gender non-conforming directors and 50% from POC directors.
(UM): A few weeks ago, I read an interesting article about Polanski and Woody Allen movies. They could get distribution in Europe, but not in the US. I’m just curious if some controversial filmmakers submitted their project to your festival, would you consider their films?
(JK): We don’t really have a direct policy against it. We have to be responsive to that, but we’ve never stated like, “Oh, we definitely will not program films by this person or films by people who are in this situation.” It would have to be a conversation among our programmers for sure. I don’t think that Roman Polanski’s going to come knocking on our door submitting a film to us. We typically program from directors that nobody’s ever heard of, right? That’s some of the exciting part of our work but we take it one film at a time. We really look at the film itself and we do care about the filmmaker as well, because we’re filmmaker oriented. We try to bring as many filmmakers to Atlanta as we can. We want to try to give them a boost. We’re not a huge market festival that has people buying films at our festival. That doesn’t typically happen for us, but we want to try to do what we can to serve filmmakers. It’s not not a consideration, right? It does go into our thinking, where we’re like, who are these people that we are supporting, that we’re putting our name behind?
(UM): What about Russian filmmakers? If they submit their projects, would you consider them right now?
(JK): Yes, we wouldn’t dismiss them out of hand. You’re probably aware of this if you’ve worked in the festival sphere at all, but for a long time a blanket policy that a lot of festivals have is to automatically waive submission fees for filmmakers who are working in Iran, because Iran is sanctioned by the US State Department. And if you live in Iran, you cannot physically pay any entity in the US including us or FilmFreeway or whoever. So that’s sort of a blanket policy we have. I don’t know if we have extended that or whether we’ve extended anything to Russian filmmakers yet. But I think in the interest of consistency, of keeping that policy, like where a country is sanctioned by the United States State Department, we should compensate by allowing those filmmakers to submit and finding a way to do that. I think there may be people who take issue with that stance, but I don’t think it makes sense to penalize the citizen of a country who’s making art and wants to share their art. I don’t think it makes sense to penalize that person for the actions of their government. I would hope that most people would understand that.
(UM): In terms of support for filmmakers, if a movie gets awarded at your festival, do you offer cash awards or any kind of theatrical screening deal? How do you try to support the filmmakers who get awarded?
(JK): We do offer cash awards or cash prizes for awards for almost all of our categories. I guess the exclusion there would be our audience awards. They are awards that are voted on by the audience. That is very much just like bragging rights, like you got the vote of the audience. For instance, we’re an Academy Award qualifying festival, so that means if somebody wins the narrative short award at our festival, that person can then submit paperwork to the Academy of Motion Picture of Arts and Sciences to become eligible for an Oscar, the live action short Oscar.
There are 3 categories that film festivals can qualify for the Oscars for, we’re in all three. So narrative short, documentary short and animated short. The winner of each of those awards can then become Oscars qualifying. It’s sort of like a feather in our cap. Years ago, the Academy also changed its rules around eligibility for features. It used to be you would have to have a qualifying run, and I think just New York and LA, you’d have to have a theatrical run of a certain length and certain number of shows per day. There are all sorts of stipulations and then you could apply to be Oscar qualifying. It used to be just New York and LA and now they’ve added a few cities, Atlanta being one of those. So we are able to extend to our narrative features, our doc features winners. We give them an Oscar qualifying run at our main venue, the Plaza Theater in Atlanta. If we have sponsors that want to kick in, we’ve given away camera packages, rentals, things like that. We’re happy to have some generous sponsors there but the cash and the theatrical and the award qualifying stuff is the core of what we offer for prizes.
(UM): I wonder how many venues you have and how they are spread in the city.?
(JK): Yes. Our main venue has changed a lot over the years, but we’re really lucky to have a very long standing relationship with the Plaza Theater, which is in the Poncey-Highland neighborhood of Atlanta, and that’s going back decades at this point. That’s our core and everything’s always organized around that. This past year we had some shows at the Carter Center, as in Jimmy Carter, the former president. His presidential library is in Atlanta. We did some screenings there, and we also screened at a local improv theater that we have another friendly relationship with. I think the Plaza now has three screens. It’s an old 1930’s movie theater, so it has one large screen in there, and two smaller auditoriums. We can run quite a bit of our program out of that and almost everything that we did was out of that one venue. So it’s nice to have a real home base and to really take over the venue for 10 days. When we’ve had to expand that, we’ve tried to leverage partnerships with local theaters and things. That’s our outline right now. Next year we will also be expanding a little bit into a theater that’s just changed ownership. It used to be a Regal theater, like a chain theater up here, and it’s recently become independent. So we’ll be moving up there, as well. I used to work in New Orleans at the New Orleans Film Festival, and the venues could be a challenge, just trying to keep a good relationship with the venue. There was no equivalent to the Plaza for a long time in New Orleans.
(UM): In terms of funding, what are the major sources of your funding? Is it private equity? Is it donation?
(JK): We’re an IRS recognized nonprofit. Our main source of revenue… I feel like we have a pretty balanced diet. I’m not on the financial side of things, but I feel like in terms of what keeps us sustained, it’s a combination of sponsorships from businesses. Sometimes that’s been big businesses, sometimes small businesses. But our development team works very hard to secure sponsorships. Also, the ticket sales are always a revenue for us. We get a lot of submissions, so that is a source of revenue for us. It’s a sustaining resource for us. And then we also have some grants as well. I know somebody in our development office could do a better job of rattling off all the grantors we’ve worked with, but I know we get support from both state and federal arts organizations. The National Endowment for the Arts is currently providing some support as well as Georgia State Arts funders. We’re lucky in that respect.
(UM): How important are the ticket sales for you? Some festivals prefer films that secure ticket sales.
(JK): Comparatively, I would have to think we’re less reliant on those sources of revenue than a lot of festivals. We’ve been able to keep the ticket price fairly cheap over the years. It’s typically cheaper to go to an Atlanta Film Festival screening at this point than it is to go see a regular movie in a movie theater, which I think is nice. Just trying to keep it so that people can afford to come to our shows. In terms of the programming end of it, it’s not typically a part of our calculations if we say that we’re not going to be able to sell a lot of tickets for that. Of course, attendance. We don’t want to program a festival for no one. Sometimes we have to make hard calls, like where we really believe in a film and we know we’re going to take a hit on attendance just because the appeal might be greatly appealing to a smaller audience segment, to a smaller number of people. I can say that we’ve made a couple of those calls. I’ve only been on this job for a year here. We’ve done that and I think it’s nice when it pays off but I will say we think more in terms of Attendance. Attendance numbers are important to us both because yes, there’s some ticket sales involved with that. That’s our revenue source, so we shouldn’t discount that, but also, it means that our programming is resonating with our audience, right? More people actually coming out to a screening. Whether they paid to be there or not, whether they got a ticket giveaway, or they have a pass that they got in for free or whatever.
(UM): I understand that you only moved to Atlanta a year ago, but are you aware if the online experience and COVID have had any lasting impact on your festival? For instance, I attended Sundance, and I noticed that they still offer an online portion, much like Tribeca continues to do.
(JK): We are still very much a hybrid event. We had almost all of our screenings both in person and online. This year, one thing I worked hard to make sure happened this year was that everything would get an in-person screening. I think we’re always probably going to be a hybrid festival, and I hope that that’s always possible. I know that filmmakers, distributors, and producers, probably are shifting a lot in terms of their willingness to put a film online as a part of a festival. I know that Sundance can typically get what they ask for. But not every film that played Sundance this year played online. In some sense, we’re going to have to be responsive to that. Like I said, with keeping the ticket price cheap and affordable, I think that putting films online is a great way to ensure that we are not holding the audience down. It’s a great way to make sure that as many people as possible see these films that we believe in and that we spent most of our year trying to bring to an audience.
(UM): What has been the impact of COVID on theater participation, in terms of both the number of people attending and the frequency of their visits?”
(JK): I don’t have exact stats, but I feel like the general picture is that, of course, it was a disastrously negative impact. In between working in New Orleans and here, I worked at a cinema in New England, back in Massachusetts where I’m from. I can tell you, trying to reopen a cinema in 2021 was no joke. It was tough. I think everybody in the world of in-person exhibition, maybe people who work at like concerts and music festivals would beg to differ, but on the cinema theatrical side, it’s been hard. I will say I go to the Plaza Theater in Atlanta quite a lot, our venue that we work with. I go see shows there all the time, and they have bounced back in an incredible way. I think the festival is in the process. We’re somewhere along that curve. We’re just trying to bounce back from taking this huge hit during COVID. I think it’s a work in progress, but every year we see some improvement. Of course, the question that’s on everybody’s mind is, long-term theatrical cinema, in-person movies, where’s this going? We’re definitely a part of that. Trying to figure out how this is going to work for us long-term, but I will say we’ve been able to sustain. Before I came on board, in 2020 to 2022, Atlanta was able to sustain a festival, to have people’s calendars every year, to show movies that we’re worth seeing. That’s job number one to keep that going.
(UM): What is your vision for your festival in 10 years from now?
(JK): [sighs] Ten years? That’s a long time. I don’t know, there have been times… To get a little bit of real talk for you. I’ve thought about leaving the field quite a bit before I got this job. I took this job because I knew it was a perfect job for me, given that I worked in New Orleans. New Orleans and Atlanta have always had, between their festivals, a real connection. So I knew this was the right place for me but thinking 10 years ahead is tough when you’re in this field. It’s not a great job market all the time. You don’t always find that perfect job. I’ve definitely had long periods of struggling with that. In terms of where I would like to see the festival, I think we’re really going to see in the next decade this whole conflict between staying home and going out when it comes to movies. I don’t think either one is going to win out. Theatrical is never going to kill people’s TVs and I don’t think theatrical can be killed. I really don’t think so. I think as long as there are people who are coming to see films in person. I do think it’s the best way to see a movie and I watch a ton of stuff in my house. We have a really great video rental store here in Atlanta called Videodrome. I go there every week and I get my discs. I get stuff that I couldn’t find elsewhere. So I think there’s room for all of it. At various points I’ve been really depressed about the prospects of movies, theatrically speaking, and that includes film festivals too. Because that’s really all we are. I would never want to work for an online film festival. I don’t know. When I think 10 years in the future, there’s a lot of uncertainty. I think we’ll still be around. The film society’s been around for almost 50 years, so I think it serves a purpose. Part of me wants to say, in 10 years, I hope that we’re still doing this. I hope that we’re still serving the same values. I think a lot can change about the outside world, and a lot has changed. I’m almost 40, so I’m getting to the age where I can look back and see how much things have changed, even just in my adult life.
To me, what doesn’t change for me are the values. The values of what I want to see in our program, what I want to see represented, both in terms of who is able to get into our program, what kind of diversity we’re putting up on screen, and what kind of diversity exists within our filmmaker core, and the sorts of values that are put forward in the films, in terms of pushing boundaries and being fearless and creating films. That stuff doesn’t really change. I think as long as we’re still around and we’re able to ride the waves of whatever’s coming at us. That’s really what I get excited about when I look into the future. It’s just being a presence like we’ve been for decades in Atlanta.
© 2020-2023. UniversalCinema Mag.