A Note About Jury Duty

This weekend, I had the pleasure of serving on the Best Documentary Feature jury at the Sarasota Film Festival.  It was the fourth time that I've been on a jury and was a very enjoyable experience with my friends and colleagues Liesl Copland and Matt Dentler.  When we gathered on Saturday for our juror deliberation lunch, we had a wonderfully thoughtful conversation about the eight films in competition - a diverse and well-considered group of films programmed by Tom Hall and Holly Herrick - and after much back and forth, we mutually agreed to give the grand jury prize to STRANDED: I HAVE COME FROM A PLANE THAT CRASHED ON THE MOUNTAINS and a special jury prize to TO SEE IF I'M SMILING.

The latter film I will write about from Hot Docs next week, but wanted to make quick note about the former film, which I had written about when I saw it at True/False in late February.  In Columbia, I had a strong reaction to the film's running time (which is over two hours), but noted that I was still deeply impressed with elements of the film, particularly the interviews.  Since I was going to be judging it in Sarasota, I wanted to take another look at the film, so I watched a portion of it again when I arrived at the festival.  This time, I was less definitive about the film's deliberately slow pacing (although I still would argue for the film to cut down for its rumored theatrical release), sensing that perhaps the filmmaker was conveying something about the length of time that these men were, in fact, stranded.  I also recognized that my own feelings about the film's length may be part of my current mindset that almost every film could be shorter.  In any case, with some new perspective I went into our deliberations with STRANDED as one of the films that I'd support for the award.

I won't go into more detail about our discussions, but I wanted to write about this because I think it points to something about the jury process that I believe is important for other filmmakers to understand.

Last year, when ABOUT A SON was on the festival circuit, we were in competition at approximately 10 festivals.  We won three times.  In most cases when we received a prize, we were awarded over a film that had been recognized over us in a previous festival.  Different juries talking about different ideas came to different conclusions.

There are all kinds of reasons why filmmakers care about festival awards.  There's the branding that a jury award can give you, a set of laurels on your poster or a new talking point that you can use with a distributor.  There's often a cash prize (it was $5,000 in Sarasota), which can obviously be of great benefit to a documentary filmmaker.  In that context, it can be a bit maddening sometimes on the filmmaker end of this process, wondering why juries make the choices they do.  Even as someone who also writes about nonfiction films and covers the festival circuit (with and without my own film in the mix), I get a bit baffled at some jury choices.  I'm sure more than one juror has wanted to slug me when I look at them and ask, "How did that happen?"

The truth is, three other jurors in Sarasota (or elsewhere) might have come up with other films to award.  I say this not to undercut our own choices, but to recognize that the process is ephemeral and, dare I say, a bit mysterious even to the participants.  It's possible that if Liesl, Matt and I gathered a week from now we might have different choices, films having had a longer chance to sit with us.

But in each of the times I've been on this side of the jury process, I've been impressed by the care with which the jurors take in their deliberations.  Serving on the Truer Than Fiction nominating committee this past fall made me supremely honored that another committee had chosen to nominate ABOUT A SON the previous year.  For filmmakers who have never been on this side, I think it's an important thing to know and to understand.

So my thanks to Liesl, Matt, Tom and Holly and all the filmmakers whose work we got to watch, discuss, consider and debate over.  More soon about this year's festivities on the gulf coast...

Comments

[Pamela]

My question is why are the same people chosen to jury over and over and over again at all these domestic festivals? There seems to be a lot of insularity in the choices of who's jurying these competitions. How are jurors chosen and why isn't there a wider array of voices and points of view to jury these competitions?