Festivals, premieres, openings, fairs and private previews reported from inside, covering programming, access tiers, timing and what a week is really for.
Festival juries are cast like films — a president with marquee weight, members balanced across craft, geography and gender, and a conflict check that keeps anyone connected to a competing title out of the room.
A benefit concert is two productions at once — a show and a fundraising instrument — and the second half, accounting for every dollar raised, is what separates a charity event from a marketing one.
The carpet an audience sees for ninety seconds is a construction project — modular decking, engineered fabric, steel tribunes and a crew working overnight between premieres.
A festival in a town of a few thousand residents must build a temporary city — screens, beds, budgets and volunteers — and the economics only close when the whole community underwrites the event.
The world's oldest film festival stages an eleven-day program on a narrow barrier island, and the machinery that makes it work — venues, badges, boats and quotas — is a logistics operation dressed as a party.