A Word On Premieres
17th Jan 2012
As director of ShAFF one of the things I like to promote is the number of trailers that we screen in any given year. Obviously a true premiere is something that has never been screened in public anywhere in the world. It’s fairly common for film festivals to advertise a UK Premiere, or even a European Premiere for a film that’s already played in the States for example. It was always pretty easy to differentiate between such geographical screenings, though we did stop short of Yorkshire Premieres ;-). However, over the last couple of years as Youtube, Vimeo and other video hosting websites have gathered pace it’s become quite commonplace to launch whole films, especially short ones, online before they’ve ever been screened ‘in public’. Let’s face it, any filmmaker trying to pay back a sponsor for backing a film is going to choose to go online and attempt to woo the masses on Twitter and Facebook rather than wait for a film festival somewhere to screen it to a hundred or so people. A good chunk of the films screening at film festivals are now actually online if you go looking for them. It’s something we festival directors are having to face, reminding audiences that there’s nothing to beat a big screen and sound system, a packed audience all oohing and aahhing together, and sharing a pint in the bar afterwards. So, in order to simplify things, where it is indicated on the ShAFF website that a film is a premiere this means that it has not screened at a festival in the UK before.