We spoke to SFJFF Executive Director Peter Stein about youth involvement in his festival and festivals in general:                         

  

What’s the turnout to youth-made films usually like? How many youth in general show up to any of the films?  

As I’m sure you know, particularly during the summer, teenage audiences are extremely hard to pin down: they make their own plans, make commitments at the last minute, and it’s not so easy to organize groups of kids through schools since school’s out. That’s been one of the challenges to bringing younger audiences into the festival.

The youth filmmakers and their cohort of people are an amazing marketing army; they went out and sold hundreds of tickets. We had hundreds of kids under twenty the other day who came out.  

We also try to get younger audiences through the youth pass. 40 bucks gets you into any movie you want to see, and we’ve already sold 50-60 of those passes. Young people are actually willing to commit to a whole pass. There’s also seriously discounted student pricing.

We also have other films in the festival that are great for teens to see. There’s The First Time I Was 20 (with Marilou Berry from Look at Me), a completely wonderful French film about a 17-year-old girl in France in the 1960s who’s a talented musician who wants to play bass but is a bit of a misfit.

 

We’ve also used viral marketing, like for Talent Given Us, a sexy film for ages 15, 16 and up, a very underground, American independent, Sundance type. We did word of mouth marketing at bars and clubs and 900 people under 30 years old showed up.

Most people who haven’t been to the festival see SFJJ and might assume it’s for an older crowd or wonder if it’s religious, and that’s absolutely not the focus

I’ve heard people say they avoid special “youth showings” because they’re afraid the quality of the work isn’t going to be up to par with what the rest of the festival is offering. any comments on that?

The fear is correct, and that’s one reason why we don’t bill our youth creations as “special youth films”. We show it as a short before a solid professional film festival film because the films and theatrical work from our Filmmaking Project stands on par with anything we program.

But for many youth productions, a lot of stuff necessarily is going to be raw-edged, not as polished, some of the storytelling techniques are going to be weaker…but that doesn’t mean that the voices aren’t just as authentic. We need to value this work as representing a generation just finding its own way to tell its own stories.

Why do you think youth involvement and input in international festivals tends to be so low, and what can the filmmaking community do about it?

Most film festivals around the world do not have the organizational bandwidth or resources to screen and program much youth film. Obviously, there are great exceptions like the Golden Gate youth awards from the SF International Film Festival.

But on the whole, most film festivals don’t have the resources to have the program staff be soliciting and screening and programming films from a student or youth constituency if their main goal is to be reaching young adults and older audiences.  

But it’s a mistake not to include youth voices. Youth filmmakers are the experienced filmmakers of tomorrow and youth audiences are the adult audiences of tomorrow. My hope is, as we’ve done with this community-based festival, to make room for the widest possibility of voices. While programming funds are always limited, we want to make sure that this segment of the population that is so useful and changing is represented at least through a popout program, or at least have a series of films that speaks to younger audiences.

And it’s not just about the programming: there should be young people represented on the board. There’s the hope that we can one day do that, have programming advisory boards that include young people, because that constituency is vital.