Interview: Rachel Rosen
Rachel Rosen serves as year-round Director of Programming for Film Independent and the Los Angeles Film Festival. She began working for the New York and San Francisco film festivals while obtaining her Masters degree from Stanford in documentary film, then progressed to a post-graduate job with Film Forum before returning to San Francisco. After overseeing programming operations for the decades-old San Francisco International Film Festival, Rosen jumped at the opportunity to relocate to Los Angeles since she recalls, "It was an opportunity to really build a vessel, and that to me is the most exciting thing about this festival." While a film festival in L.A. seems like a natural fit, it's been a challenge to cultivate a truly world-class event for Rosen and Festival Director Rich Raddon. Rosen discusses how the Festival has blossomed to overcome this obstacle while identifying itself as one of the best things a filmmaker can hope to be a part of.

What are your main goals for the Festival?
The goal is to have a world-class film festival in Los Angeles — that's it. And that means to have films that reflect the diversity of Los Angeles, to have programs that use the rich resources of both the industry and non-industry elements of our city, to have business be done because
this is a place of business but to also be accessible to the population of Los Angeles and be a festival for the people who live here.

Where do you find the films?
One of the ways is through submissions. I know there's a myth that people send us films but those don't actually get into the festival, which is completely untrue. We get over 3,000 submissions — features and shorts — and we watch every single one of those tapes that comes in. Films get into almost every section from the submissions. But it's also true that it's our job to be talking to people — to producers, sales agents, reps, directors, people who've been to the festival — and really cast the widest possible net talking to people about what might be out in the world and hounding filmmakers to let us have a look at their work.

After those films arrive in the office, what happens?
We start watching them. We have a group of associate programmers who work with us and the programming staff meets once a week to talk about movies. We'll go around the room, talk about what we saw that week, what we liked about it and what we didn't like, and trade tapes around. So rest assured, everything that's in the festival has been well considered. This goes on for months — we'll start watching stuff as soon as we open for submissions, which can be as early as November, right up until we lock the program in April.

What are the qualities that you're looking for in a film that would play this festival?

This is always a hard question to answer—I can't come up with a list of criteria because if I did the next day I could see something that had all those elements that I'd listed and it wouldn't work for me, or I'd see something that had none of the elements I listed and I'd love it. So the closest I've been able to come is to say we're looking for a film that succeeds on the level that it's trying to achieve, whether it's visual, emotional, intellectual, or all three. It's hard to articulate what vision is, but that's kind of as close as I can get. Obviously, it's exciting when people have fresh ideas, when things look great, when there's good acting — there's a lot of elements that we can look for on a checklist, but that thing that makes a thing work is pretty hard to articulate.

For a lot of filmmakers reading this, that's an encouraging answer since it doesn't stipulate budget or a level of resources that might alienate a very low-budget production.

Yes — if there's one thing that I've learned after five years it's that the budget doesn't really have that much of an effect. We see lots of stuff that's big budget and very slick; some of it is good and interesting and new and fresh, some of it is very slick and not very interesting. And the same is really true of low-budget; I mean, the fact that it's easier for people to pick up a camera and make a film doesn't make it easier to make a great movie. So by the same token I don't just appreciate the low-budget aesthetic if the film isn't saying something emotionally or intellectually.

Let's talk about the competition line-up — first, how you select those films and then what that attention can possibly mean for a filmmaker.

One way we set the parameters of the competition is similar in a way the Spirit Awards are different from other awards. It's a competition for American feature narratives and documentaries, but the way we define American is the way the Spirit Awards defines it: Two out of the three of the director, writer, or producer should be American or have a green card. So that means we've had films with subtitles in foreign languages shot elsewhere, and that's compelling to me because we want to highlight the diversity of what American independent filmmakers are doing. I think that's part of what makes L.A. interesting and it's part of what makes the U.S. interesting.

Being in competition always gives a little bit more attention to whatever films are there, and obviously the hope is to help them on their way to find an audience. For some of them there may be a mainstream distribution deal in the future, and for some of them there may be other ways of finding their audiences out there, but we want to shine a light on them. It's one reason why we've kept the competition small — we really want to focus people's attentions on the films we decide to program.

When you make an offer to a filmmaker also considering other festivals, what do you say about the benefits of choosing to premiere or screen in Los Angeles over those others?

A lot of festivals these days seem to be collecting a large number of films, trying to bank as many premieres as they can get; the theory seems to be throw everything up against a wall and see what sticks. We very consciously taken a different approach: If you're accepted, you're going to be one of a limited number of films in this festival, which means you're going to be able to talk to us about when the best time is for your first screening, what you think the audience is that you want to reach for your film, what your goals are with it, even what distributors you might have in mind. And because we keep the size limited, we can really work with people to make a screening mean something. I think that counts for more than whatever advertising clout or name brand some festival might have. Also, we are in Los Angeles, so it is a great place to be exposed to both the public and the industry. To have a screening that has a real audience and to be covered by the industry is a big advantage.

Often times, a filmmaker gets their acceptance and says, "Oh, shit — what do I do now?" There are things that the Festival and Film Independent do to try and prep them, but what's the best advice you have for a filmmaker who doesn't really understand how a festival like this can help their work?

It's true production is so arduous that many people focus just on getting the film done and don't focus on what's beyond that. You could do nothing and come to the Festival — we actually have a lot of programs that will work to help you find your way. But the more you know about what you can do to make your own experience here better, the better your experience is going to be. We talk with the filmmakers and have various departments work with them to help them not be passive participants but be active promoters of their own film, let us know what their goals are so we can try and help them with those specific goals and not abdicate responsibility for the success of their film here.

To that end, one of the strongest things this festival does is try hard to make it accessible to the public through pairing films with different groups or neighborhoods that will help the filmmaker reach a target audience.

I do think that the Participating Organization program is one of my favorite things that we do because not only does it help those films find an audience but it really helps us. We love to work with other organizations in Los Angeles; we love matchmaking, that's the bottom line.

What is your advice to filmmakers — whether they're a Festival alum who is reading this, a filmmaker about to participate in the Festival for the first time, or a filmmaker gearing up to submit next year — about how they can take advantage of this festival as part of the big picture of their career?

Be thinking about the future of your film and also about your own future and what you want to do next, because I think we have some really great programs — like Speed Dating and Fast Track — to bring filmmakers together with people who can help them do whatever they want in addition to helping their current film find its path. It really helps if people have an idea of where they want to go from where they are and a lot of times people haven't thought about that because they've been working so hard. I don't think you have to have a project ready to pitch, but you have to know what kind of advice you're looking for in order to get good help. Like if you're a documentary filmmaker and you know you want to make a narrative film, you would have to think, "What kind of advice do I need to get from here to there?" because you're going to meet the people who can give it to you, and if you're focused about it, it can be a huge opportunity.

The other thing not to be overlooked is the fact that all these filmmakers meet each other at the Festival.

Yes, that's a huge thing! Creating a community is a huge goal for us and I do think it's true that people at other festivals often get really fixated on promoting their own film and forget to take the time to get to know the other filmmakers in the festival. But it's true that it's as likely that you'll be working with those people next as it is that you'll be working with an executive that you meet.

Holding the Filmmaker Retreat before the Festival starts really hammers home that message.

The retreat is maybe the best thing we do at the Festival; it seems kind of frivolous when you tell people about it from the outside, but there's a real reason for it. The idea is to get people out of the place where they're going to be working to take a deep breath, remember what it was about filmmaking that excited them in the beginning, and take the time to get to know other filmmakers. I really think that those relationships fostered on that retreat have been concretely beneficial to the participants and their filmmaking careers.

How do you work overall to keep the festival growing and changing and to that end, what's different about the 2006 festival versus years prior?

We're about to make a huge step forward this year. For me, the number one thing is the partnership with the Los Angeles Times because I think it's going to give us a visibility that we haven't been able to offer to the films in the festival before. I also think the move to Westwood is really exciting because it's going to create a lovely environment and it's a place where we can continue to grow.

I think the first few years we had fantastic programs with the public catching up to us year by year, but this year the Los Angeles Times is going to help a lot more people catch up to what we've been doing.