The Edinburgh Film Festival is more or less a chance for network executives, directors, actors, and anyone involved with TV and films to come together and discuss the future of the industry. What this means is that around 2,000 delegates from various networks will be present to discuss and hopefully come to the conclusion upon what direction the industry should be taking and what, if any, changes need to be made. This allows the networks to focus upon any serious issues in programming, take into account what might be better for their own programming needs, and to converse and decide just what needs to happen in the development of the industry moving forward.
The festival was started in 1976 and has been held in Edinburgh ever since, though the organization’s headquarters are in London.
While the festival is all about nurturing new talent and securing a future for the industry and its rising stars it is also important to note that while this is very much a needed event it s something of an extravagance. There is a great deal of revenue to be had thanks to this festival but there is also a great deal that is to go into each festival to make it possible.
All this is geared towards making programming better and it would seem that some years it does happen to work while others it does not. So in truth just like anything you take the good with the bad and hope for the best while preparing for the worst. Should the delegates ever reach a full, unanimous decision, and it’s likely that such a thing could and has happened, then you would expect the programming to benefit from such a thing. But with the hits and misses that happen every year it is obvious that agreements made in Edinburgh do not always transfer over to the various networks that continue to operate after the fact.
It is easy to be cynical about something you do not fully understand but from what it looks like this is yet another festival that is brought together under the pretenses of doing some good in the industry and yet is there for the self-aggrandizement of the industry itself. I could be wrong and I hope I am.
After all this festival is by the industry and for the industry and unfortunately while that could be a great thing for the industry itself it does little to nothing if agreements aren’t reached on how programming needs to change for the benefit of the viewers. Once again this is a single point of view and one that could be in error since there is little that is actually said about the festival aside from what it does and what it is meant for.
The benefit of course to the industry could benefit the viewers overall as the ideas of how to present various programs and what is acceptable on TV and what is not could have a huge, lasting impact. The goal after all is to promote positive changed in the industry and allow those to in effect influence the general public.
