With challenges in securing
sponsorships and unpredictable
audience sizes, it’s a tough year for film
festival directors like Terry Costa (of the
Portuguese fest).

Terry Costa wasn’t too talkative about this year’s Portuguese Film & Video Festival. The fest’s director, who was supposed to be celebrating the event’s fifth year along with Vancouver’s 10,000 or so citizens of Portuguese descent, told the Georgia Straight it has been a casualty of the recession.

“We didn’t receive the support to be able to put it together,” he said in a phone interview. “It does suck.”

The festival will either be cancelled for 2009 or be postponed.

The PFVF, which usually runs during Portuguese Heritage Month in June, was the only festival in dire straits that the Straight was able to confirm. However, representatives of all nonprofit festivals noted that the recession—which has so far cost the nation 406,000 full-time jobs, according to Statistics Canada—has affected their bottom lines.

Even the megalithic Vancouver International Film Festival has felt the effects, according to board chair Michael Francis. It’s by far the city’s largest, with 150,000 people expected at the October 1 to 16 event. Although none of the festival’s long-term sponsors have pulled out, Francis told the Straight in a phone interview, it has lost a few short-term ones.

“Everything is a struggle,” he said, “not the least of which is uncertainty about the size of the audience. So we’ve been budgeting in a very conservative manner.”

In fact, he said, the festival is always conservative, so it has the reserves to survive a short-term crisis. All the event’s usual sponsors—media, film companies, and broadcasting—are under financial stress right now, he noted.

The administration, Francis said, was shaken by what happened last year. On TV during the first week of the festival were the Sarah Palin-Joe Biden U.S. vice-presidential debate, two Canadian federal-election debates, and the drama “of the largest stock market drop in history”. This all proves how unpredictable audiences and revenues can be, he said.

This year, the task force on Employment Insurance reports on September 28, so it’s possible another federal election will eclipse the festival.

“In that event, I think people will really like the idea of going out to see a film,” Francis quipped.

They may or may not be able to see one at Second Beach, the usual location for the Vancouver park board–run Monsters in the Meadow festival. In 2004 and 2005, the festival was run on park board funds. In 2006, Coca-Cola came onboard as a sponsor. This year, even though Coke has offered to sponsor again, the board hasn’t decided there will be a festival. What are they deciding on?

“Staff availability, budgets, what other festivals and films are happening,” board spokesperson Joyce Courtenay told the Straight. “We’re still considering it. We haven’t made a decision yet.”

The 10-year agreement with Coke includes $270,000 for marketing and product support. In exchange, Coke is the board’s exclusive soft-drink supplier.

Drew Dennis, the executive director of Out on Screen, the nonprofit organization responsible for the Vancouver Queer Film Festival, told the Straight facetiously: “Stephen Harper said the recession will end in two months, so we’re not worried.” That probably has more to do with the festival’s 20-percent increase in programming and 53-percent increase in attendance over the past few years.

Still, the festival—now in its 21st year, and running from August 13 to 23—has a budgeting “plan B” that includes a drop of up to $10,000 in individual donations and $40,000 in corporate money. Dennis said that any cuts would hopefully be inconspicuous—such as bringing slightly fewer international filmmakers to the event, for instance.

“This may be fitting in some way, but our focus is on hope this year,” Dennis said, mentioning that one film being featured, Tarnation (2003), was made on a budget of $218. “In hard economic times, it makes it harder for people to do things. But creative people are glimmering beams of hope, because they continue to do amazing things with very little—which doesn’t mean I support that they have amazingly little to do things with.”

Fresh off her first ride as DOXA Documentary Film Festival director, Joni Cooper told the Straight that the festival’s booming success in trying times can be attributed to two things. First, she said, people are interested in documentaries right now. Second, they keep expenses down, running a tight ship with just three full-time and one part-time staff members.

This year, the May 22 to 31 fest took a gamble and increased from six to 10 days, and the audience nearly doubled, with 8,053 people attending.

“Because of what we saw this year, we’re going to try to stay the course,” Cooper said, noting that neither government grants nor corporate donations grew alongside the size of the festival. “There’s a chance we’ll get even less money next year, so we’re looking at places we can cut back. We’re just hoping our audience stays with us.”

That’s just about the opposite tack to what the VIFF’s Francis suggested: a conservative approach. But in uncertain times, as all the directors know, what works is also uncertain.