My dear friends Dave and Allison got hitched last weekend so I was unable to attend this year's edition of Sheffield. So I asked filmmaker David Schisgall, who was attending the fest with his feature VERY YOUNG GIRLS, to offer some thoughts on his experiences there:
The train to Sheffield from Manchester Airport takes you through a lovely hour's worth of rolling green hills dotted with grazing sheep, no buildings in sight. However, I can't say anything about Sheffield itself, because once I got to the festival, which is only two minutes by foot from the station, I was so swept up into one of the world's great documentary-only festivals that I never wanted to leave to take a look around the town.
The festival is sized not to be overwhelming, with about fifty features and an equal number of shorts, and
tremendously well-organized. It seemed there was a walkie-talkie equipped staff member immediately at the elbow of any scruffy doc maker who began to look confused. I appreciated that the fest's programmers were focused on quality rather than having that unhealthy preoccupation with premieres: many of the titles were among the little-known gems I had seen on the festival circuit in the last year, like Michelle Wu's FRONTRUNNERS or Cynthia Lester's MY MOTHER'S GARDEN, and to me, the relative scarcity of premieres, and their evident good company, made me actually want to see them rather than assume they were at the festival because, well, they were premieres. I caught Channel Four's THRILLA IN MANILLA, which had all the joy of spending ninety minutes with Muhammad Ali along with the unnerving experience of listening to intelligent foreigners -- in this case Brits -- tell a story about race in America.
(Ed note - THRILLA first screened this summer at the final edition of BritDoc, where it picked up an honorable mention in the British Documentary Competition.)
That was the only film I actually saw at the festival because most of the time I was there I spent at the MeetMarket, Sheffield speed-dating program for producers, buyers, and agents. It was also crazily well organized -- everything moved like a well-run train system -- while being overall quite relaxed for a cage match between potentially bored buyers and often desperate sellers. There was even tea, cookies, and sandwiches. The amount of meetings my partner Tom Yellin and I made in two days, without no prep on our part, would have taken us two dozen hours of research and emails and calls and scheduling and rescheduling and travel time to do ourselves. It was a huge boon to our project. I even feel it was more efficient to fly to Sheffield to meet with people I know here in New York, because I didn't have to schedule and reschedule the meetings and I could do them all in one afternoon. Sheffield has other pitch forums that were going on as well, but I wasn't there, so I can't tell you about them, but if they were as well-planned and executed as MeetMarket then I am sure they were worth the trip.
The parties were typically British -- a low emphasis on food with a correspondingly high emphasis on booze, with expected results. All the venues are densely located so you can't help running into everyone who's there. It was great for me to see old friends like Liz Mermin and Michael Tucker, and to meet for the first time revered colleagues like Ross Kaufman. A reasonably sized documentary festival is just the
thing to make you feel that you are not alone out there and that people actually do appreciate your work and share your hopes and troubles. The locals are friendly and keep the screenings reasonably well filled. Best of all, as an American you no longer have to hang your head about your country's political choices: if you like, you can even lord America's superior Progress and self-evident Cool over our benighted English cousins as we did in the days of Elvis. We're back on top, baby! U!S!A! U!S!A!
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