In festivals as in real estate, location is all-important. The landscape of a festival represents one of its defining features – Venice and Cannes are European coastal resorts, Berlin and New York world historical cities. The Lussas Film Festival – what many in France call the “Woodstock of documentary – takes place in the Ardèche region of southeastern France. More than 2,000 directors, producers, critics, and students descend annually each August on the little village of Lussas (pop. 1,129) for a week of 120 screenings, day-long seminars, copious conversations, and local cuisine.
Lussas is a festival mostly for young people; the twenty-something students sleep in tents in open fields, while their elders pay to stay at modest accommodations. As at the Telluride Film Festival in Colorado, the festival is the only game in town, so everyone hangs out together; “la convivialité” is its’ programmers’ principal goal. This lecture emphasizes the fundamental role of location, geography, place in the structure and function of one particular festival, while drawing comparisons with other, better known, international festivals.
Biography
Jeffrey Ruoff is a film historian and documentary filmmaker in the Department of Film and Media Studies at Dartmouth College. He has contributed chapters to five books and has published articles in many journals, including CineAction, Visual Anthropology Review, Wide Angle, Cinema Journal, Documentaires, Iris, Visual Anthropology, and Film History. His anthology Virtual Voyages: Cinema and Travel was published by Duke University Press in 2006. His films and videos, including Hacklebarney Tunes: The Music of Greg Brown (1993) and The Last Vaudevillian (1998), have been shown at festivals and on television in the United States and abroad. He is currently researching and writing a new book Out of the Shadow of Cannes: Film Festivals in France and has recently completed a stint as a member of the jury of the Festival Jean Rouch.
