While fall film festivals like Telluride, Venice, and Toronto set the tone of the awards conversation, they are but the tip of the iceberg when it comes to the long, literal road of Oscar campaigning.
From October through November, in addition to weeks-long festivals in major global centers like New York and London, there are a growing number of regional film festivals that host plenty of major contenders. These festival haven’t just proven predictive over which films receive Academy Award nominations, but actually influential.
The Woodstock Film Festival, which ran from October 15 – 19 this year in the Hudson Valley of New York, often has over two dozen attendees who are members of the Academy’s Documentary branch. Many awards prognosticators find that group in particular difficult to read, with their Best Documentary Feature shortlist often including a couple titles not in the mainstream consciousness.
Artistic director Meira Blaustein, who co-founded the Woodstock Film Festival in 2000, recently IndieWire over Zoom, “I find myself every now and then telling people when I recommend the film, I say, ‘This one is going to be nominated.’ I’m not even saying I think it’s going to be nominated. I’m just saying, ‘No, you should see this, it’s going to be nominated.’”
She added, “Of course, I can be wrong, but after having done it for a while, you just develop a sense for that.” Blaustein’s expertise in predicting documentary contenders extends past knowing films like “No Other Land” and “Porcelain War” would be nominees, into the Documentary Short category, where she points out that both “The ABCs of Book Banning” and “I Am Ready Warden” were films that received a spotlight at her festival before they became Oscar nominees.
Those latter two shorts were both produced by MTV Entertainment Studios, serving as an example of how, as Blaustein said, “the studios have been recognizing that more and more that it’s good to show a film here [at Woodstock] because the voting members watch it and they watch it in an environment that is also very enjoyable and relaxed and they can really pay attention.”
Oscar-nominated composer (and Oscar-winning documentarian) Kris Bowers echoes the idea that the film festivals that are more off the beaten path are where talent gets the chance to establish a better connection with their influential audience. Speaking to IndieWire at the Middleburg Film Festival, which screened his “The Last Repair Shop” co-director Ben Proudfoot’s new film “The Eyes of Ghana,” which he scored, Bowers said the rural Virginia-based event is “the festival that is incredibly important in this awards season, that is very intimate and small and familial.”
His first time at Middleburg was in 2018, when he was on the awards circuit as the composer of eventual Best Picture winner “Green Book.” Bowers said, “Coming here that year, [and] directors being here and actors being here, it felt like it had the same prestige of all the other festivals, but I could actually have a conversation with people. Or be in the lobby and there’s a party going on and not be told to go somewhere else because it was too important for me to be there. And I feel like that connection within our industry is something that I feel I love so much about this festival.”
Bowers has since become a regular at the festival founded by businesswoman Sheila Johnson and led by executive director Susan Koch, as it continues to screen a high percentage of selections that go on to receive Oscar nominations. “Anytime they ask us to come, it feels like it’s because they believe in us, and they do that with ‘The Last Repair Shop’ and with [‘The Eyes of Ghana’],” said Bowers. “So for them to believe in us and to have that track record and to be curating festivals that they are so intentional about feels mainly just a huge honor. It’s always exciting.”
Regional festivals like Woodstock, Middleburg, Savannah, Hamptons, Mill Valley, Virginia, and more serve as an important reminder of the positive aspects of the film industry shifting away from one central location. Blaustein, who is also a filmmaker, said that when she first moved to Woodstock, the town only had one tiny arthouse cinema, “but the festival really became a hub, a magnet right away.” An increase of production in the area, for films ranging from “Michael Clayton” and “American Gangster” to “Sing Sing” and “Materialists,” have led to more and more festival attendees becoming locals.
“It was this repeat pilgrimage to the festival that kept on growing the community and the fact that that also brought all these film productions up here. So many of them then decided to buy homes here, move up here, make their next films here. There’s always a snowball effect,” she said. “During the pandemic, of course, that just mushroomed very quickly. And today there is a really burgeoning community of voting members of the academy, both on the documentary side and all the other general branches [like casting].”
Two-time Oscar-winning director Proudfoot believes that the increased importance of regional festivals is a reflection of changes in the Academy itself. “What we’re seeing today and as we approach a hundred years of the Academy is that cinema really belongs to everyone, it’s global. … It’s not just Burbank that has a lock on what movies are, actually it’s a human art form, it’s a global art form.”
Proudfoot’s new film “The Eyes of Ghana,” centers on Chris Hesse, personal cinematographer to revolutionary leader Kwame Nkrumah, who got to showcase some of his long-archived, recently digitized footage at the still-being-restored Rex Theatre in Ghana. “In the future, the world over should be peppered with all kinds of centers of cinematic excellence,” he said. “And these festivals are a way to grow that, further that, and celebrate it.”
And if someone wants to really campaign for awards? “You have to put in the legwork as a filmmaker to go out there and pound the pavement and advocate on behalf of your people, your storytellers. And that’s what I see my job as being,” he said.