This is my sixth festival as director and I've watched the event grow every year. We expect more than 11,500 schoolchildren at the screening of 19 films in five venues this year.
As the main organiser of this annual event, I work fulltime on the festival along with two other people, and these next two weeks of intense activity are the yardstick by which we can tell how successful we've been. At the moment I'm juggling about 30 different things all at once, from waiting for film reels to arrive from other festivals to organising the staff of the five different venues. Our office is based in the Irish Film Centre (IFC), where a lot of the screenings will take place, but I'm also running all over the city from UCI Coolock to UCI Tallaght to make sure all screenings run smoothly.
The festival opened on Sunday night with the screening of an American film, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle, at the IFC. Apart from big Hollywood movies like that, the film festival gives Irish kids and teenagers an opportunity to see new films from all over the world that they would not usually see. I've spent the last year travelling to all the main international junior film festivals from Italy to Berlin and have watched more than 200 feature films and 200 short films in order to choose the titles to be shown here.
Over six months we narrowed down the programme to the 19 titles that are now in the programme and there is a great mixture of international films from all over the world. Obviously the films from Spain, Italy and the Scandinavian countries carry subtitles - and while they may require a little more effort from the audience, they offer a glimpse of foreign cultures that makes it worth it.
The Scandinavian films are more open about teen sexuality and social issues such as marriage breakdown - sometimes that doesn't rest as easy with an Irish audience, so I did have to be sensitive when choosing what to screen. The age suitability of all films is clearly tagged in the brochure for the benefit of teachers. It annoys me that the junior film sector is not taken very seriously here in Ireland; there are some great films made for young adults but they rarely get a screening.
The festival also fulfils an educational role and screens five of the films on the Leaving Cert course. Dances with Wolves is once such film, and it should be seen on the wide screen to appreciate it. We also run a series of workshops in conjunction with the films that are hosted by figures from the film industry. Choosing the films is the cultural strand of my job, but the management of the event and the fundraising that has to take place are probably even more important. The festival costs around £55,000 to run and ticket prices are low, so they only cover a small percentage of this figure, so I do spend a lot of the day raising finance. We receive a grant from the Arts Council and just last week I submitted the forms for next year's request.
I studied marketing at the Dublin Business School and worked in market research for a few years before taking over as festival director. I got involved with the Dublin Film Festival while I was a student and I always remained very involved in the event so when I took over my current job I was fairly confident that I knew the ropes. But my first year was such a learning process.
Organising to have the films here on the right day is the biggest headache. There is usually just one copy of the film for the junior film festival circuit and although we book the film with one of the various distribution companies around the world a long time in advance, the film may have been viewing in Canada some days previously - so we are dependent on the organisers of that film to pack it up and deliver it to us.
A 90-minute feature film arrives on six or seven reels that then have to be re-assembled here. I try to attend every screening at every venue to oversee the process but sometimes logistics don't allow that. When we finish our screenings we must then break the reels down again and send them on to the next destination. Thankfully, to date we've never had to cancel a screening because the reels didn't turn up - but there are no guarantees.
When the festival finishes on December 5th the financial audit begins - and after that the whole process starts over again in preparation for next year.
In conversation with Sue Carter
