WITH MARTIN ROSENBERG
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SFR: How did you come to be chairman of the Santa Fe Film Festival's board of directors?
MR:
My background is in managing large non-profit corporations, professional membership organizations, in New York and Chicago. After coming here, I did a couple tours of duty as treasurer with Fine Arts for Children and Teens and enjoyed that interaction and impact on the community. I always loved cinema and still do and, after arranging some exhibitions of a film poster collection as a benefit for the Festival, I found I really enjoyed the quality of the board and the staff and it was a natural evolution toward more involvement, serving on the board and ultimately having the honor to serve as chairman at the moment.
And you've just announced a new year-round venue the Festival will manage called the Santa Fe Film Center at the old Cinemacafé. What's the rationale behind a permanent, continuous facility?
From the perspective of business management for a nonprofit, it's pretty clear that a purely seasonal organization can be hard-pressed to sustain a regular administrative staffing overhead component; and even to do just a few activities during the year, at least to do them well, you have to maintain an administrative structure and promotion and marketing ability. And the mission of the Film Festival is really to provide something for the community, something that's more than just an event, something that's an ongoing interaction. So now we can offer outreach, education, components that would serve the Native American and Hispanic communities and also do a lot for local filmmakers and provide a resource for the film industry to gather and to show rushes and network.
How, specifically, might you serve Native American and Hispanic communities?
Well, for example, we have plans to do a Spanish-language program-not just a mini festival-but to have a component in our program in which Spanish-language cinema is present all year. It's a different set of responsibilities and a different commitment than just doing a few Spanish-language films every now and then. But that programming will be shaped, in part, by those communities. It's better to have the special interest group you intend to serve help shape and influence the content of what you're doing. We expect that in all of our film series, educational or entertainment or professional, we will be working with experts to produce the content, as opposed to just laying it on the community and saying 'here it is, look at it.'
The annual Film Festival has always utilized multiple venues around town. Now that you have your own venue, will that change?
The Festival shows almost 200 films and we need every venue possible. For the next festival in December we will use the Film Center but hopefully still use as many other venues as are available to us.
Does operating all year position you as a competitor and strain relations with those other venues?
We certainly don't think so. It's really a two-way opportunity. Our wonderful venues such as CCA and The Screen, they have some wonderful thematic programming and if they wanted to they could expand that and our house would be available to them. And we've offered that to them.
Those venues have expressed frustration about the Film Center coming on line when they're still waiting for the Festival to settle debt with them for screen rentals.
The opening of the center was an opportunity presented to us by a very generous family who owns the property. These are the things you can't plan on that kind of come your way and this will enable us to generate an audience program without a major investment. There's no doubt operating the Film Center will only improve our revenue stream. It's important that we all work efficiently and collaboratively so the community's resources can be used well.
Is another full-time theater showing art and independent films the best way to exemplify efficiency and collaboration?
Less than 10 percent of all cinema production is ever actually distributed and viewed so there's an enormous amount of quality work that goes unseen. Consider our emphasis on education, providing the facility to other non-profits, supporting the industry and showing local filmmakers two days a week-more than two-thirds of our mission is different from anyone else. The overlap of quality films should be so small as to not effect our colleague organizations that are also showing very fine films.
I applaud you for planning such a regular showcase for local talent, but I have to be skeptical; is there really enough programming?
We think so based on the almost 750 filmmakers that have submitted over the years to the Film Festival. Out of those, a decent percentage are New Mexico-based. Jon Bowman, our executive director, recently spoke to more than 40 filmmakers who are interested in producing documentaries here. There's just a tremendous undercurrent of activity here and we really foresee no problem in being able to provide a steady stream of local film.
Jon Bowman is also a film columnist and critic for Pasatiempo. He said he believes as long as he doesn't cover any of your events, no conflict of interest exists. Do you perceive any potential conflict regarding his dual roles?
Well, I know Jon really well and one of the things he's done is beautifully kept separate his responsibilities as a reporter on the film industry and as director for the festival. He's never used his position in an inappropriate way. I have no concerns about that at all-his work is at the highest integrity level.
