In June of last year, employees of Fantasia Fest, North America’s largest genre film festival, went on strike, seeking better pay and improved working condition In addition to securing substantial gains for the employees, the strike also drew attention to the situation facing many people who work at festivals.
That situation, and the desire to bring attention to it, is why I’m excited to be working with the Film Festival Alliance on the Film Festival Workers Survey! While the study is designed to capture the experience of all kinds of festival workers, in this post I’m going to speak to my own experience as a film festival programmer.
I have been a programmer for a long time, and for as long as I have been doing this work, I have been listening to my fellow programmers complain (with good reason) about how badly we’re paid — if we’re paid at all. Over the past two decades, very little has changed. In fact, at many festivals, in the wake of COVID, things have gotten worse. This is undoubtedly a difficult time for festivals, but given that this issue predates COVID by a long way, it’s clearly a bigger problem.
There is no lack of outrageous anecdotal information — one major US festival is currently offering programmers a rate that works out to $14/hour, on par with the minimum wage in some states. Another large festival paid one of its top programmers the same stipend for twelve years, with no cost-of-living adjustment, meaning that the programmer was actually making 25% less in real terms at the end of this period than at the beginning. But until now, there has been very little actual hard data available, which is why this survey is so important.
How did we find ourselves here? There are many contributing factors — I think the first is that most programmers love what we do and believe passionately in its importance. On the face of it, that’s a great thing: we are fortunate to work in a field that we love. But it’s also a liability; festival workers are vulnerable to exploitation precisely because if someone cares enough about their work that they would do it for free, there’s a greater likelihood that they will end up doing it for free.
Another significant factor is a lack of respect for what goes into programming. This is almost certainly related to the low value our society places on arts and culture work in general. A national survey conducted as part of a recent report by the American Academy of Arts & Sciences, “Art Is Work: Policies to Support Creative Workers,” found a startling gap between Americans’ opinions about the personal value of the arts (high!) and their opinions about the value of those who create and present that art (not so much).
This lack of respect may also result from a lack of understanding of what programming is — after all we’re just watching movies, right? How hard can it be? But even people in a position to know exactly the expertise, experience, and skill that go into good programming – the network of connections built over years; the relationship with an audience; the in-depth knowledge of film history, genres, and national industries -- don’t seem prepared to pay for it.
There is somehow a disconnect between what makes a festival worth attending in the first place — the particular movies it shows -- and the people who choose those particular movies. If programmers are essential to creating the value of festivals, they should be valued commensurately.
Programming is rarely a priority in the current festival business model. Budgets are tight, yes – but even when budgets are tight, some line items have a higher priority than others. For example, a similar survey produced by the Film Festival Alliance in 2022, “The Film Festival Staffing, Workforce, & Compensation Survey,” showed that festivals often spend as much as half of their revenue on director-level compensation. This same report observed that “certain roles command more secure employment (full-time, higher wages), while others less so (contractor + seasonal, lower wages), without a clear connection as to why those roles are considered more, or less, important to the organization.”
Regardless of how we got here, compensation and working conditions are ultimately a labor issue; the Hollywood strikes in 2023 and 2024 were a valuable reminder of the importance of unions in this industry as in any other. Programmers have no union, no centralized institution of any kind, and no set of agreed-upon guidelines or rules to protect the work they do, which makes them especially vulnerable.
It is therefore perhaps not surprising that many festival programmers are badly paid, with no benefits, and no job security, existing in a perpetual state of precarity. My hope is that the data produced by this survey will allow for greater transparency and enable a conversation that we should all want to have, within and across organizations and the field as a whole.
The Festival Workers Employment Compensation is open through April 30th. Take the survey here now and pass it along to your colleagues in the field.
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