How I made a film festival

One day in Paris, I accidentally came across Culture-Aventure , a travel documentary film festival. I really liked this idea right away. Literally a year later, my friends from England organized the same film festival in Germany. There has never been anything like this in Moscow before, and I decided to fix it.

People who were also interested in this began to gather around my initiative to organize a film festival myself (we called it Travel school festival). So far, everything is happening on a volunteer basis: each of us has studies or some kind of main job, and the festival is a creative side project. We found volunteers who work directly at the festival, there are several people who communicate with the media. Someone translates foreign films and makes subtitles, someone is responsible for the design - they come up with a logo, posters, business cards and banners.

The festival itself consists of three parts. The first part consists of full-length special films by famous foreign documentaries. This year's festival headliners are French director Christine Moral, German documentarian Thorsten Niemann, British human rights activist Jeremy Gilley and documentarian geographer Yulia Kolesnik - such a blog of professionals you can look up to. Each of them has its own niche: it can be a travel movie, a documentary genre on television, or a popular science film.

I search for some of these films myself - I have many friends in Europe who can advise me. We ourselves contact the directors and invite them to show films at the festival and give a master class (this year our participants told the audience about how to combine travel with cinema, there were master classes about the profession of a fixer, “how to become a travel journalist” , “how to go around the world and write a book about it” and “how to create a TV show about travel”).

The technical format of the competition program is to be a short film of up to 15 minutes, filmed on anything. The ideological criterion is an interesting story, where the hero himself and his interaction with the environment are presented. We are announcing a competition for this program. From all the submitted works, we are trying to find something that corresponds to the travel-movie genre - half-staged, half-fiction, and at the same time, auteur cinema. Then we send these films to the jury members (this year - TV journalist Yulia Shchukina, Yulia Kolesnik, cameraman Alexey Lebedev and author of a book about a trip around the world Vyacheslav Krasko), who look through everything and select the 19 best for screening. At the festival they confer once again and make a final decision.

The most difficult thing in organizing a festival is finding sponsors. We don’t have any monetary sponsors yet, but we do have barter sponsors. This year, the Aviasales company itself offered to cooperate and paid for tickets for two of our directors. They also provide the main prize to the winner - a certificate for the purchase of air tickets for 20 thousand rubles (2nd and 3rd place will receive a subscription to an online course in travel journalism from Yulia Shchukina - editor's note). Another sponsor - the Artel Hotel on Kuznetsky Most - in it our foreign guests stay for free during the festival. They provide all this to us in exchange for advertising - they install their banner at the festival, and we write about them in all press releases, on the website, on social networks.

It is necessary to agree on the premises much in advance - this year, before getting to ZIL, two of our sites were demolished. At ZIL we rent a hall - we sell tickets for 200 rubles for one full festival day, and they provide us with the hall and equipment.

Last year we held the Travel school festival at our friends’ site - in the Avant club in the ArtPlay design center - they had their own bar, and at that time we showed a movie. It's very convenient. We didn't even have to rent a room.

The Travel school festival film festival takes place from May 17 to 19 at the ZIL cultural center.