ABSTRACT
Before my discussion of the critical practices involved in the curatorial process of film festival programming, I want to first contextualize my own commitments to and background in film festivals. The first festival I curated, in collaboration with fellow doctoral candidate Susy Zepeda, was the Women of Color Film Festival (WOCFF). I had left my investment banking career in London to pursue a doctorate in the History of Consciousness in Santa Cruz. The city on a hill and its occupants felt alien to me, and my academic advisor, Angela Y. Davis, encouraged me to take on the challenge of curating the festival as a way of finding community. A year later, on a panel on the “activist potential of film festivals” at Frameline, San Francisco’s LGBT Film Festival, I met Shari Frilot, a senior programmer at the Sundance Film Festival and former director of the MIX New York Experimental Lesbian and Gay Film Festival. As a response to my naïve positioning of community-based festivals in opposition to “mainstream” festivals, Frilot invited me to work for her at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival and gain insight into the relations of independent film production, exhibition, and distribution. One of my committee members, B. Ruby Rich, a feminist cultural critic and longtime beloved member of the independent film scene, encouraged me to accept the offer and complicate my analysis of how films by and representations of women of color circulate within the film industry at large. Off I went over the ivory-rimmed ledge of theory, head first into praxis.
