Denouement Primer: Why the Best Movies at Film Festivals Aren’t the Ones You Hear Much About

Tim Grierson
·Editor

We know most of you have only been aware of this site for, like, a week, but we've been posting in "stealth" mode for far more months than we ever could have imagined. Thus, we have all kinds of features we haven't even introduced yet. The most prominent of these is "Denouement," our end-of-day think-piecey, talking point, gabbish wonkfest of ancillary amusement and experimentation that will run every Monday-Thursday. We'll be kicking these back up for good on Monday, but for the rest of this week, we'll get you acclimated to the concept by running some of our favorite stealth ones from the past few months. Today, "Why the Best Movies at Film Festivals Aren't the Ones You Hear Much About" by Tim Grierson, published March 16, 2011. Enjoy.

There's a romantic notion that film festivals are a place to go to discover unheralded treasures of the cinematic universe. And, sure, you can find great movies that may never come to your local multiplex because they don't have any stars or they're in a foreign language or they have a plot that sounds boring ("a man wanders the forest in search of himself"). But if you're going to a film festival for those movies, know that you're on your own: Most of the places that report on film festivals don't care about those sorts of movies.

I'm not at SXSW right now, and these thoughts are going through my brain as I try to find out what gems I need to be on the lookout for in the next few months. But for the most part, the movies I'm hearing about are the ones I already know about: Look, Conan O'Brien has a documentary about himself! Hey, "The Beaver" is coming soon! Jake Gyllenhaal is in a movie called "Source Code"!

To be fair, that's a bit of an exaggeration: Smaller movies like the U.K. gay romantic drama "Weekend" have gotten good reviews, although apparently the audience for the film's premiere was pretty small. (Everybody was at "Source Code.") But you have to really search to find coverage on these types of movies: Meanwhile, I've learned more about Gyllenhaal's bizarre urinal encounter than I could possibly ever need.

This is not just a SXSW phenomenon. Most major festivals have their celebrity-laden films, which naturally attract the most attention because, hey, they have celebrities in them. The same thing happened this year at Sundance, which is probably the worst offender at hyping stars. Movies like "Cedar Rapids" received a lot of press, but if you wanted to find out about "Take Shelter," the much-anticipated reunion of director Jeff Nichols and actor Michael Shannon, who first worked on the fantastic indie "Shotgun Stories," you had to do much more digging. Even the much-praised drama "Martha Marcy May Marlene" got a lot of its media traction because it starred the younger sister of the Olsen twins.

Of course, it's ridiculous to act surprised or offended by this: Film festival coverage really isn't that different from the movie coverage that goes on throughout the rest of the year. It's about stars, not great films. And I don't mean to suggest that "Source Code" or "The Beaver" are clearly inferior films not worth your time: I haven't seen them, so I don't know. But what the star-first festival climate should remind aspiring low-budget or challenging filmmakers is that even if their labor of love gets into a festival, they're still going to have an uphill climb if it doesn't feature an actor or actress that people have heard of. (The exception to this would be if you have an incredible, marketable hook, like a "Blair Witch Project.") If you don't have that, well, good luck to you.

A veteran film critic who travels all over the world to festivals gave me a piece of advice a long time ago that I've really taken to heart about what to see at a film festival: Don't go to movies that already have distribution set up. Sure, it's tempting to be able to tell your friends that you saw "Bridesmaids" or "Paul" first, but you're going to have other opportunities to see those movies. Instead, take a chance on an unknown movie with an intriguing plot. Or if it's a genre that you like, give it a shot, even if it's from an Eastern European country you wouldn't be able to find on a map. There's a good chance if you don't see those movies at a film festival, you'll never ever get a chance to see it again. That means you won't be going to the "hot" screenings, but you may end up watching a better film. And, really, wasn't that why you're going to a film festival in the first place?