The last few months in the European festival circuit have felt as if someone had pulled some sort of emergency brake: what seemed to be a blossoming period of rebirth and renewal in the teams across some of the continent’s most important festivals has now turned – with few, yet notable exceptions – into a sudden freeze, a certain regression that has led to the firing of some of the most visible, interesting and radical cinema curators in the business. Between 2018 and early 2020, a new wave of artistic directors with innovative views on contemporary cinema, many of them women, ascended to the top of these festivals, some having to fill in the shoes of significant figures (like the late Hans Hurch or the controversial Dieter Kosslick): Eva Sangiorgi (Viennale, 2018), Paolo Moretti (Quinzaine des Realisateurs, 2019), Lili Hinstin (Locarno, 2019), Cíntia Gil (Sheffield DocFest, 2019), Carlo Chatrian (Berlinale, 2020) and Vanja Kaludjercic (Rotterdam, 2020/21).

Of them all, in 2022, only Sangiorgi and Chatrian remain unshaken – Hinstin resigned after the 2022 edition due to “divergent views” with the Locarno management, as did Gil (whose team was fired without preliminary notice), while Moretti’s departure is enveloped in rumors that he was punished for not programming enough films helmed by members of the French Directors’ Guild. Lastly, Kaludjercic is in the middle of a considerable scandal after Rotterdam announced the restructuring of its team, which led to the firing of the festival’s entire team of programmers, some having been its collaborators for well over a decade. In this context, the only good news as of late has been FIDMarseille’s radical decision to appoint a collective artistic leadership body instead of an artistic director (after the retiring of current director Jean-Pierre Rehm following a 20-year-old tenure).

The firestorm that erupted after Rotterdam fired its programmers – claiming that it had to cut its personnel due to reported losses of $2 million, prompted by pandemic constraining them to have two consecutive online editions while fusing its artistic department into a new one, titled “Content” – led to an ampler discussion about the precarity and uncertainty that grip international film festivals, all the more so given the fact that the Dutch festival was considered amongst the industry’s most stable and well-paid. Belgian cinema magazine Sabzian published an ample piece on the affair, documenting reactions across the press and the festival’s team, along with worrying accusations of intimidation and a climate of fear – while over on Indiewire, Eric Kohn analyzed these changes in the larger context of European festivals, noting that “Time and again, programmers are handed harsh reminders that they have little job security even at top-tier festivals.”

At the same time, to the south and east of the above festivals, but also at the continent’s two largest – Cannes and Venice –, any changes seem outright impossible at the moment: while Thierry Frémaux and Alberto Barbera are amongst the most long-lived artistic directors in the histories of their festivals (starting in 2001, respectively 2012), Central and Eastern Europe’s largest festivals lack of the West’s most essential practices – that of having mandates that limit the time served by a given artistic director. In Sarajevo, founder Mirsad Purivatra decided to retire after 27 (!) years, leaving the former director of the festival’s market as a successor rather than a curator or critic, while continuing to work from a shadow position, as president of the association that organizes the event. In Warsaw, Stephan Laudyn, the festival’s second director, has already been reigning over the festival for more than three (!) decades. And in Cluj, Mihai Chirilov has been leading TIFF’s artistic department ever since its very first edition. Any substantial change in the leadership and curatorial direction of any of these festivals seems unimaginable at the moment.

To be clear, I am writing this text as both a film critic who has had the privilege of attending festivals abroad (such as the 2020 Berlinale), but also as a local curator/programmer – for transparency, my experience includes working in the artistic team of two festivals (the Filmul de Piatra national short film festival, between 2017 and 2019, and BIEFF, since 2016), of a cineclub (FILM MENU, 2018-2020), plus a few one-time programs or instances in which I’ve advised other festivals on parts of their selection. The reason I am mentioning all of this is not as a way to vainly tout my CV, but to say that I’ve had the opportunity to work in a variety of contexts with films of various lengths, be they recent (sometimes debuts, even in short format) or classical, from various styles and genres – and after all these years I’ve managed to hone in a larger understanding of the profession and of its responsibilities.

A programmer, a curator is fundamentally a passeur, a middle-man that has to weigh the scales between filmmakers and the larger audience and help them co-exist, or even reach a state of symbiosis. One’s responsibility is all the more vital when films directed by newcomers, students, and independents are at stake. And it sometimes entails taking risks: from selecting an imperfect film made by a young filmmaker, noticing the spark lying at its heart and wishing to encourage them, all the way to programming a 14-hour-long film across three days – Mariano Llinas’ La Flor (2018).

I’ve often heard this from (well-meaning!) people: “It must be great to watch movies all day long!” (Spoiler: you do a lot more than that). I’ve heard the (highly validating and affirmative) reverse a lot less: “I imagine that it’s really hard, no?” And hard it is, indeed, not inasmuch because it’s a line of work that asks for a lot of time, concentration, and the capacity to assimilate and memorize a vast quantity of films (especially when it comes to short) on top of logistical issues; it’s a line of work that is difficult precisely because the climate is unstable all around the world, meaning that few can make a living out of it.

And since it’s an environment where an event can lose its main sources of financing (usually, public funds) from one edition to the other, one is always haunted by the fear that everything might topple all at once – let us not forget the case of the Romanian short film festival NexT, which passed from an expansive summertime edition held in cinemas, unconventional spaces, neighborhoods and public gardens, to a December swan song in a single location, the cinema hall of the Romanian Peasants’ Museum. When a festival and a team go down, it’s more than just the audience’s encounter with it that disappears: what also goes lost is one’s access to the knowledge of its creators, shaped by years of hard work, one that is equally about cinema and its infrastructure; lists of hundreds, thousands of films and contacts turn from living objects into artifacts that can either be studied or, more often, just abandoned in the dusty corners of some email inbox or another. (I won’t even stop to mention the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the circuit, which are still very much affecting it.) Festivals most often operate in the key of precariousness, often on top of the natural tendency they have for hierarchies – which also results in its perennial need for volunteers, that is, the euphemism that we use in the industry for unpaid labor. (I digress: check out this excellent editorial by the EEFB on volunteering in festivals.)

Besides, there is a certain invisibility of the profession itself; for many, it’s as if festivals (like the films themselves) are these entities that simply pop up into the universe from time to time – and not as the result of hard teamwork. Even when we take the human element into account, oftentimes when one thinks of the fave of a festival, we frequently think of their artistic directors – or, in some cases, the executive ones; if in some festivals both roles are held by the same person, usually, artistic directors are the one to be associated with the public-facing role of a festival, while executive directors are usually seen as working “from the shadow” (it’s not always the case, though – see TIFF). But this kind of thinking typically neglects the fact that any given artistic director has a team at their back, if the festival doesn’t do much to render their work visible (calling upon them to present screenings, or to pen catalog texts); unfortunately, oftentimes we have the opposite – the team’s work is claimed by the organization’s higher-ups.

What many members f the audience are unaware of is that, in fact, artistic directors only get to handle a much smaller number of films that the one which is really processed by a festival (which is something to keep in mind while reading press releases about the hundreds, thousands, or tens of thousands of submissions they receive). They first pass through the hands of pre-screeners and programmers who, aside from culling them in accordance to their quality and various criteria of selection (depending on the festival’s categories or niche), work as the first level of constructing the discourse of a festival. Yes, festivals have a general discourse, even when it’s not acknowledged (for example, by announcing a theme). And that discourse relates to more than just a given topic, or a given relationship (be it political or otherwise) to the present moment, one that in some cases might even be explicitly activist in spirit: the discourse is equally one on cinema itself, on the aesthetics that the festival wishes to promote, but also – crucially – one that is shaped by more than just a single film but is created through a dialogue that comes forward from the juxtaposition of the films placed in a selection, either in their totality or partially.

Sure, the artistic directors are still the ones who have to manage the larger perspective of this vision, with coagulating the discourse (of course, if this counts as a concern) – but pre-screeners, programmers, and, depending on the case, curators and/or regional consultants are those who work to construct the elementary units, the syllables, the individual sentences in this discourse. Sentences that might be constructed while keeping diversity in mind – of genres, geographic regions (especially non-European ones), filmmakers and their identities, of debutantes – from their positions as gatekeepers, as the ones who are the first to shape the discourse of a festival and, with it, contemporary perspectives on arthouse cinema.

It’s increasingly difficult to understand why this work is invisible in the era of an endless debate about festivals vs. streaming platforms, given that the largest players in the latter market, with their infinite catalogs, are starting to underperform and expose their limits (just take a look at the recent Netflix crash), while smaller platforms like MUBI and DAFilms, which operate within rigorous curatorial frameworks, have seen their user bases rise significantly since the start of the pandemic – and they even plan on extending their work into the in-person field.

The truth is that we need curators – we need them in a world flooded by audiovisual materials, where the limits between day-to-day life and online existence are starting to blur. Not that we need them because we lack opinion leaders who should decide what films reach the audience and which don’t, but we need them because it’s necessary to have people who are properly equipped of making sense out of this apparently infinite amount of films, who can preserve them, or highlight them in a context which gives them a greater meaning, the chance to connect to other works of art – both in cinemas and at home.

Main image via Locarno Film Festival.

Flavia Dima

Film critic & journalist. Collaborates with local and international outlets, programs a short film festival - BIEFF, does occasional moderating gigs and is working on a PhD thesis about home movies. At Films in Frame, she writes the monthly editorial - The State of Cinema and is the magazine's main festival reporter.