DOX:Forum/CPH:DOX:17
Nomally panel discussions are boring with a lot of repetitions. This one was different. The panelists complemented each other and were open in their sharing information and points of views on the involvement of the art museums in distributing films.
Jytte Jensen from MOMA New York told that the museum is pretty active in that field, showing documentaries regularly and keeping a film on the agenda for a week. The latter provokes a review in the NY Times. Without paying rental fee, as it is great promotion for the film and filmmaker to be at MOMA! However, when the museum buys a print for its collection, they pay 2,5 times the print prize. Or money is given through handling fees. She mentioned ”Dinner with the President” (= Musharraf), updated version, as a current example. Director: Sahiba Sumar.
ICA in London was represented by Mark Adams, who takes care of the film activities of this Institute of Contemporary Arts. He stressed that their documentary involvement had grown, both in terms of their screenings and with the, primarily 35mm, distribution they operate. Re payment ICA operates as every other art cinema distributor.
Andrea Picard from Cinematheque Ontario, curator of Wavelengths at the Toronto Film Festival, was the one who underligned that there are more and more visual artists who move into making films, but she also stressed that there is actually nothing new in this: dada, fluxus, surrealism, Dali, Man Ray etc. But there is also a move in the other direction, from the film world to the art world. The names of Chantal Akerman and Pedro Costa. This move seems also to have a financial reason, if I understood it correctly – more funding available in the art scene. Crossover is the key word, as it is for the cph:dox programme policy.
