There is a crisis in international short film festivals. When the millennium arrived, so did the process of transforming traditional cinemas into digital projection houses. As predicted, most cinemas now distribute and screen works via hard drives and not cellular reels. This terrifies Hollywood, as digital piracy makes it very difficult for it to control profits. But for both the independent filmmaker and independent film festival, it has meant a sea change in distribution methods, making their roles less stable and defined.

With the use of the internet, Youtube et al., videomakers are able to distribute their works without the aid of independent distribution houses, as well as academic and market film archives. Makers no longer need festivals to help them reach an audience or earn commission. At the same time, film festivals often have a difficult time showing fresh work to their audiences, as it is no longer necessary to go anywhere but home to view works by your favorite makers and up-and-coming troublemakers. So many independent film festivals are fearing extinction due to a lack of perceived relevance.

Take the Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen (“International Short Film festival Oberhausen”) as a case in point. Each year, the former industrial city of Oberhausen, just north of Dusseldorf near the border of Holland, transforms into a week-long gathering place for film and video academics, curators, makers, producers, and institutional types from around the world (but mostly Europe). It is here that the latest and greatest works in the short film category are screened in cinemas like the Lichtburg, inside the old city center, itself an experiment in survival in the age of the commercially fittest urban environment. This past May 1- 6, the highly respected festival celebrated its fifty-fourth year. It seems this it was never meant to be a “creative city” marketing scam by the city’s fathers, but instead a tradition set up by some very committed filmmakers and academics who felt the short film was God and they were dedicated to her.

Arriving by train, Rachael and I were greeted by a lovely assortment of football hooligans and liter-bottle-of-beer-wielding mutants, giving us a friendly reminder of home. We immediately fell in love with place. More love came after the amazing and sweet hospitality team gave us accommodations at a nearby hotel, and we found out we could get schwarma twenty-four hours a day, watch naked German girls on basic TV all night long.

It was shocking to discover that the Oberhausen festival was like an industry festival with over 600 invited guests, presumedly all accommodated by the city fathers and their dozens of partners in the state government, foundations, and private hotelier business. When we attended film/video screenings, we noticed very few locals in the audience. It seemed strange that the festival had no relevance to the inhabitants. It was like we were all conference attendees and tourists, being sent to investigate the wares of an antiquated format dealer of eight-track tapes in Peoria, Illinois. But perhaps that was because we arrived late, after the big party opening weekend . . . And when we went to screenings, we picked a few duds, like the Hong Kong Art Center’s art grad program. Snore . . . So we missed most of the good international competition work. We made it to maybe thirty of the 400 or so works on screen. So we are useless in terms of recommending the hot works, except for the Grand Prize winner, an animated film called Chainsaw by Denis Tupicoff.

Maybe the best movies were outside the cinema. We watched old time friends reunite. We saw the hoi polloi of the moving image world like Keith Sanborn, and handfuls of art stars (in their own worlds) trolling around with sunglasses on. At one point, we saw our buddies Arjon from Utercht’s Impakt festival and Kyle Harris from Free Speech TV in Colorado. “What the hell are you doing here?” was a common refrain. The “It’s a small small world” effect made us feel cozy and comfortable, and we went straight to work.

Instead of feeling like we were dropping in on someone else’s wedding, we went journalist, started interviewing everyone we could find on the street or at the late night parties, about what they felt about the Oberhausen festival and about the panel discussion on future of festivals. The results were fuzzy and varied, but we all agreed that festivals like Oberhausen were completely necessary. Kyle Harris opined that they need to continue in order to host an atmosphere of personal networking, and that they should continue to play the key role that all festivals play: selection. Who cares if you can watch everything online? Who cares if everyone can make their own short movie using their cell phone? Almost everything looks like shit. And it is not worth soaking up all the Youtube stream just to find one new fresh work. Let the kids do that. Or the curators.

Even if everyone is a curator in these interweb days, once in a while it becomes important to let the anointed and elected cultural elite put things into context. Everything else that is detrimental to old ways of doing business is going to happen with or without input. It serves us all to historicize, bemoan, and celebrate these developments in a format like the film festival.

Some thoughts offered by the Director of the Festival, like transforming into a moving image museum, seem too defeatist. But these are trying times for festival organizers, and the highly competitive funding environment is looking more and more American, i.e. developing and mining their “creative class.” While at the Oberhausen Film Festival, I picked up postcards for at least two dozen more short format events coming that summer. It seemed like overkill.

Our contribution to the conundrum would be making the Oberhasuen festival more exciting, fresh, and dynamic. How, you say? We would ask the festival to use more environments besides the cinema and their film library to view short works.

Next year, they should use many of the abandoned storefronts in the city center to make installations or twenty-four-hour screening centers. Why not sit and watch some movies streetside with some liter-bottle-wielding bums, enjoying a schwarma sandwich? Why not set up a dozen exhibition centers of emerging work in storefronts right off the main cinema? Capital-‘C’-curators should mine their library to create programs that can be seen on the street, and maybe on the local cable access channel too.

It may be the only future for this festival, giving the residents and visitors something else to engage in besides business as usual. Oberhausen is a city where the decaying industrial past is being shorn, just to show that they have the biggest mall in Germany. It would be a shame if they decide that the festival is part of the industrial age past, and that it’s probably time to put a Digital Projection Multiplex in it’s place.

by Ed Marzewski