The Borderlines film festival ran for 17 days in February and March. It took place in 26 locations, including pubs, churches, assembly rooms and village halls, across Herefordshire, Shropshire and the Welsh Marches.
We’ve learned a lot in the festival’s 14 years about running rural arts events at this time of year. Here are my top tips:
Make use of networks
This is the advice I return to most. Flicks in the Sticks (the touring cinema branch of Arts Alive, which takes big-screen films to rural communities) works as a network: each village or market town has a promoter who knows their audience, has direct contact with them and chooses suitable film titles. The central organisation books the film and helps with marketing.
Borderlines operates in the same way, supplying a menu of festival titles from which to choose, but the final selection is made locally. Our marketing works with similar principles: we supply the materials, and the promoters and volunteers (who know about the best places to leave brochures or display posters) distribute them.
Keep it local
Allow for idiosyncrasies. We don’t dictate how films are shown in each venue in which the festival takes place and we respect that we are working with their audience and process. Screenings are social events and village halls often make a profit out of selling refreshments. Sometimes they like to have an interval,
which can be disconcerting for the audience.
One of our board members remembers attending a screening of The Counterfeiters at his local village hall. It was just at the point when one of the German guards had urinated on a prisoner that the projector was switched off, the lights went up and a voice boomed: “Tea!” Films with local connections, particularly archive material, are also a boon for attendances.
Rural audiences love world cinema
It may take time to overcome people’s prejudices against subtitles, but
cinema that takes you to far-flung areas of the globe has been proven to be immensely appealing. The Ethiopian debut feature Lamb, which we showed before its UK release (so no reviews or word of mouth promotion) completely sold out.
Within the context of the festival, we often have full or nearly full venues for fairly obscure foreign titles, which in a London indie cinema might only attract a handful of people. Here, they are perceived as different and special. A recent article in Little White Lies movie magazine hit the nail on the head when it said that small film festivals are “world cinema’s Médecins Sans Frontières”.
Give viewers a voice
The social factor of film festivals is important, so it’s advisable to provide social spaces where people can meet and discuss what they’ve seen. We’ve sought to engage with our audiences in other ways too, giving credence and value to their opinions.
At our main venue, The Courtyard in Hereford, where we screened about seven films a day, we instituted a voting system so that people popped their ticket stubs into boxes with one- to five-star ratings. We published the results on a noticeboard that was scrutinised intently as the festival progressed. We also did analogue tweets: we had a dedicated Twitter account that recorded what audience members commented on Post-it notes about the films.
Don’t patronise rural audiences
Lots of people who live in the country have sophisticated tastes. Their joy at discovering the richness of cultural choice on offer at least part of the year knows few bounds and they will be your strongest advocates. We have little trouble getting people to attend the preview screenings the Independent Cinema Office (ICO) negotiates for us. Our audiences, whether lifelong locals or former urbanites, respond to the challenge of seeing something new and untried.
Get out there
Poor communication is one of the undeniable challenges that rural film exhibition faces. It’s not just distances; broadband underperforms and there’s barely a mobile phone signal to be had in some parts. That means kissing the idea of live tweeting goodbye. But the effort of making contact makes it all the more worthwhile, whether it’s a quick exchange over a garden gate or sitting down over a cup of tea for a longer chat. What’s hardest about arts in rural areas is also what makes it most necessary and rewarding.
Jo Comino is marketing manager for the Borderlines film festival, which is programmed in partnership with the ICO
This is an edited version of an article first published on the Independent Cinema Office blog
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