When I was working on my piece for the Chattanooga Film Festival, like most of you I had a few questions. So, I reached out to Executive Director and Lead Programmer Chris Dortch II for a few comments for my initial piece. Chris has been the director of the CFF for seven years and was kind enough to give some really thoughtful answers that gave some real insight to the workings behind this revolutionary indie fest. That being the case, I thought it warranted its own post as more of a Q&A, rather than trying to trim some of these answers to one sentence sound bites.
For those that haven’t purchased badges yet at chattfilmfest.org, from the looks of things they are starting to sell out, with VIP badges already gone. The quantity is actually capped, so I wouldn’t sleep on this one folks. The virtual festival opens proper Friday, May 22-Monday, May 25 with a great lineup of genre titles that has everything from Sundance favorites to Brazilian splatter-gore.
With that said, check out the Q&A below:
Firstly, how will the films be streamed, what platform and can anyone attend?
Attendees will be able to go to chattfilmfest.org via their laptops, buy their badge, and then access our streaming platform all on the website. From that same platform, they’ll be able to access our live panels and events via Microsoft Teams. If folks do prefer to watch on their TV, they can connect their laptop to the TV when they’re streaming films.
Due to distribution rights, we were only able to open to US Residents.
Giving the fear of piracy from filmmakers with something like this (I know that affected Amazon’s attempt at a fest), how did you convince these filmmakers to choose your fest? You have a great lineup.
I won’t lie to you. We lost some films in this war we’ve been fighting to go virtual. For every filmmaker that trusted us and chose to be a part of this there were others that couldn’t say no quickly enough. Even more than piracy in many cases, though, people were afraid that screening online would hurt their chances at distribution. I can’t tell you how much that pisses me off. Not that these filmmakers said no, but the idea that there are distributors out there that are looking down their noses at films that are making the choice to let themselves be exhibited this way during this insane time. Piracy also makes me even more furious now than it did before. In this case it literally cost members of our audience [the chance] to see a number of truly great additional films.
There’s no way in hell we wanted to try and twist the arm of any filmmaker that may have felt that way, either. We know how devastating piracy can be for indie filmmakers, and when our partners at Microsoft and Mediakind approached us our very first questions were about security. It’s even the reason we’ve chosen not to allow the festival to be accessed via the Google Chrome browser. In addition to that, we’re asking absolutely every one of our “attendees” to sign an anti-piracy pledge in hopes of even further fostering a community that’s a safe one for filmmakers. Beyond these measures a number of additional technical security measures have been put in place including:
-30,000 cap.
-Behind a paywall.
-Stream security on the MediaFirst Platform uses industry standard DRM, Widevine (Google), FairPlay (Apple), and Play Ready (Microsoft).
-Pre-encoded assets are stored on Microsoft’s secure Azure storage.
-User account creation and playback are limited to U.S. only, and all content is behind a paywall.
Finally, what was behind your decision to go virtual?
This is kind of a long answer, as there was a lot to consider.
As a completely volunteer run non-profit, we spend all year knocking on doors and singing for our supper trying to raise the modest budget we use to stage every year’s festival. The raising of this budget and the work we put in evaluating films, programming, and even promoting the festival takes almost every day we have between festivals.
The day COVID-19 was declared a pandemic was the literal day we were set to release our first wave of 2020 film titles, and after putting everything we had and so much work into building our 2020 edition it felt like we weren’t just betraying our fans but also ourselves if we didn’t try to come up with some solution. At first we kept telling ourselves “it’s cool. Stay calm, it’s just postponed. Not canceled yet,” and then we saw our close friends at other festivals begin having to postpone their own events as well….
This will sound cheesy maybe but in my mind we enter into a “sacred pact” of sorts with each and every filmmaker that puts their hard earned money into submitting their films to our festival. When people submit we make damn sure we personally evaluate every submitted film, and when a film is selected to be a part of the festival that “sacred pact” grows even stronger and more important.
If these talented creators not only trusted us to provide a home and an audience for their films, and we then just sit on our hands and blame a virus not being able to find these films an appreciative audience, it doesn’t feel right. When Marco Rota, who has now become our dear friend and partner, approached us about the possibility of trying something like this, we brainstormed together for weeks until we finally cracked a way we could go about this that would not only be friendly to our filmmakers but also make sure we had security measures to match.
Even though we are going online it’s our earnest hope, and belief, that the films, events, and programming we have put together very much feels like our physical festival.