A Programmer's Chronicles, August 2006

Filmmaker Ho Yuhang during a match of futsal

by Gertjan Zuilhof

Futsal

As befits this era, this piece is a cut-and-paste job on a previous piece I wrote for an internal festival debate. It is a debate about how the festival can provide a concrete answer to the total fragmentation of images that awaits us. Because you do not need to be a futurologist or a clairvoyant to see that the phenomenon of cinema screenings in theatres is going to change drastically. Because it already is changing. And everyone is joining in. Even festivals. Even the film journals. They sell films on DVD and offer them streaming on Internet. And analogue to VCD/music industry, this phenomenon is set to increase and accelerate.

Not so long ago, the illegal downloading of music was something for nerdy secondary school kids. Now every postman can charge up his iPod (legally). With film it will be just the same. Imagine a new film by Wong Kar-wei has its premiere in Cannes in May. In the same month, it will be possible to download it via the FNAC or you can order it as a gift when taking a trial subscription to your local daily. By the time its January, the Rotterdam festival audience has already seen the film. They are still interested in Wong Kar-wei, they may well want to see him in the flesh, but there’s no point in the festival screening the film any more.

It’s only possible to speculate about the direction developments like this will take and I would like to do that in a playful and rather provocative way in a (non) programme. The mental exercise will be: what you do when it is no longer interesting to screen films in an auditorium (once upon a time you could listen to a gramophone record in an auditorium, but we cannot imagine this in our MP3 age). You could (again) put this into the form of what-is-cinema-like debates with panels, but it can also be made more concrete, humorous and also practical by inventing the festival of the future.

In the second episode of this blog series, I wrote about the film makers DVD shop based on the Asian pirate model and in the fourth column of the series about opening up to the general public the pre-eminent professional domain: the film festival videotheque. Below you will find the nicest idea so far and in coming episodes more will follow.

To put it simply, a festival has two main goals. One is screening films in an auditorium. The other is bringing together people who make films and those who love films. Crucial in the festival of the future will be what you do when you bring together all those people if screenings are no longer relevant. The historic Nouvelle Vague came about from a group of young Paris film makers and critics who met every evening at screenings at the Cinematheque. In this way they were able to talk about the films they saw together. There wasn’t really any other way in the pre-VHS and pre-DVD era. When young film makers meet these days they exchange DVDs and download sites. They still talk about film, but they don’t visit the Cinematheque anymore. And then of course there are the countries, for instance like the Philippines, where there is no Cinematheque, but there is a plethora of (pirate) DVDs.

So film makers meet each other in a different way. For instance, I know film makers who play futsal together every Friday. Futsal is the serious and international variation on indoor football and the word is derived from Portugese/Spanish expressions such as Futbol de Sala. According to Wikipedia. After the game or rather the match, they have something to eat and also chat about film, exchange DVDs and watch DVDs together or each other’s work in progress. The meeting is more important than the screening and the discussions about film start naturally and casually. Much healthier too than endlessly sitting in the dark or hanging around smoky bars like earlier generations of filmmakers.

For instance, in order to stimulate thought, I would like to organise a small futsal competition. With teams of film makers or also distributors, producers, critics et cetera. In the middle of the festival. In a festival venue. The large auditorium of the Schouwburg strikes me as being a suitable one. Now futsal has nothing to do with making films, but nor do disco, parties, dinners and business clubs either strictly speaking.

On the accompanying photograph, you can see the Malaysian independent film maker Ho Yuhang in action. In 2005, his Sanctuary was selected for Rotterdam's Tiger Awards Competition and he shall return to Rotterdam via Venice with his latest film Rain Dogs. And he will captain the Malaysian futsal team. Malaysian football means nothing and has been declared a national political problem, but anyone who thinks they can play against the practised and motivated team of Malaysians film makers and futsal players should get in touch with me.