The Resonance Box (Part 2)

On circulation, the slow life of a film, and the institutions that host the maker rather than billing him.

I ended Part 1 of The Resonance Box, promising a road, a way out, an alternative. Here it is. It is not a manifesto, nor a revolution. It is a habit I fell into by accident and kept on purpose, and it has carried my films further than any laurel ever did. In other words, this is how I learned to survive yet another obstacle in my journey as a filmmaker.

First, the high — because we should be honest about what we are giving up.

The provincial festival, the gender- or niche-focused festival (Women, African American, Latino LGTBQ), offers a quick fix at a very low price. An invitation arrives by email; we fall for the cheap flattery and pay a nominal fee, occasionally after applying a discount code that everyone else seems to have as well. You get accepted, nominated, and the first set of laurels lifts you. A screening follows, and it lifts you again. If you are lucky, an award, a diploma, and yet another laurel — printed in seconds by an app, dispensed by the dozen — and you stack it on the poster beside the others. It feels good. It is engineered to feel good. That is what a high is for. And then the hype dies, and the film often dies with it.

It does not have to be that way. There are alternatives to the quick fix, and the best of them, stripped of all that provincial excitement, is the part nobody photographs: the slow life of a film after the applause has stopped. The word for it is circulation, the least glamorous word in this essay — which is precisely why I trust it.

Here is the road. Approach a cultural center, a civic center, a museum, the historical society, the school, the university — outside the festival, on the festival's blind side. These places carry a standing obligation the festival does not: they have to organize events throughout the year around themes that may profit from the subject of your film. The city hall, the community center, the historical society — they need to create these events to keep building community, and they do so almost silently, season after season. They have the need. You have the goods.

So the courtship runs in the only direction that respects the maker: from the one who needs the film toward the one who made it. When this happens, the inversion I described in Part 1 is complete. At the festival, you are the inventory. At the institution, you are the guest, and they host you.

I mean host in the full sense. After the work begins to circulate — that word again — there is compensation. Not a windfall; I will not pretend it is. It is something better than a windfall. It is a dignity. There is a screening fee, often $500 to $700. There is a fee for the director's presence, somewhere between $1,000 and $1,500. There is transportation, a per diem, a room for the night. I have been paid this way by the New York Public Library, and the Brooklyn Museum, by the UNAM in Mexico City and the University of Salamanca, by the Centro Cultural Recoleta in Buenos Aires, and by Yale, to name a few. These are places where the director, meets people worth meeting. And now and then, in a conversation that was never on the program — after the lights come up, over a late dinner — the next film is born. That is not a two-hour slot you paid for the privilege of filling.

Now I will argue against myself, because I did it in the first essay, and the second deserves the same.

There is one festival I will always support: the festival of the place you actually live.

If you are local, then the festival stops being a laurel machine and becomes the only honest thing it can be: contact with your own. Not the certificate. The room. The neighbors, the colleagues, the people on your street, who will watch the work and then talk to you about it at the market on Saturday. In my case, that festival is the Virginia Film Festival, hosted by the University of Virginia, and my debt to it is not abstract. Two of my films — Rita Dove: An American Poet and Monroe Hill — screened there to a full house; but more than that, they were its idea before they were mine, brought into being because its director, Jody Kielbasa, pulled the strings to make them possible. A festival that commissions the work, and not merely the laurel that decorates it, is a festival worth defending. I have shown many of my films at the Virginia Film Festival, multiple times, and intend to keep doing so — glad to pay to submit, glad to donate to the festival, for the pure pleasure of supporting the community that has supported me.

Premiere of my film on Rita Dove at the Virginia Film Festival

Premiere of Monroe Hill at the Virginia Film Festival

When you are home, the festival earns you. Everywhere else, it bills you. That is the whole of the distinction.

There is one more thing the brochures will never tell you, and it is the best argument of all.

The institutional screening is not the end of the road. It is the on-ramp. The university screening becomes the library license; the license becomes the syllabus; the syllabus becomes the citation; the citation becomes a place in the permanent collection. Libraries do not forget the way a Saturday-night audience forgets by Monday morning. A festival is fireworks. This is a root system.

And the longevity benefits everyone with a stake in the work. The press release that goes out when the Recoleta programs the film is real news, not manufactured noise — it tells your investors, your patrons, and, yes, your daughter that the work is still moving, still found, still alive years after it was finished. That is the sustainable thing. That is what the festival, for all its carpet, was never built to give.

The festival gave me a spike. The road gives me a pulse.

So I am not the supplicant anymore, and I am not the inventory. I am the guest. Let the institution that wants the film write to me, make its case, and persuade me that its audience is worth the trip. It usually can. And when it does, the film does not die when the lights come up.

It goes home with someone, and it keeps going.

This is the second of two essays. The first was the refusal. This was the remedy.