KVIFF has become a tradition for me, I went this year again and made some dope videos. As I was in between all the events I was wondering how people who have access to everything (even the events the public doesn’t have access to) experience the festival. I reached out to my friend Eirik, who has been on the jury at the festival. He was so nice he wrote an entire post about it:
My name is Eirik Bull, and I’m a Norwegian film journalist, storyteller, and editor of the website FilmLore which is dedicated to film, fantasy, science fiction, and fandom. I also run the website for Norway’s largest film magazine, creatively called “Filmmagasinet“. I have been asked to write some words about what I do and how I do it, especially when it comes to film festivals.
In 2021, I was a member of the FIPRESCI non-statutory jury at the Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, and this year I was asked to come back as a journalist. As a member of FIPRESCI (the International Federation of Film Critics), I have access to the FIPRESCI website which lets me apply for festival juries around the world.
At KVIFF, I often felt like a “fish out of water”, so to speak, as the kinds of films KVIFF focuses on (mostly arthouse and drama) are not really my thing. But KVIFF has been great regarding networking and meeting interesting people from the film industry. This year, I was fortunate enough to meet Geoffrey Rush, and I watched Benicio del Toro introduce his classic narcotics drama Traffic. Last year, Johnny Depp, Ethan Hawke, and Sir Michael Caine were in attendance. And the afterparty at the Grandhotel Pupp (where the Bond film Casino Royale was filmed), which I didn’t get to this year as I got covid, was epic.
However, as a journalist, I’m not really that interested in celebrities and meet and greets. I like to write, and I express myself primarily through articles, written interviews, and reviews. But we all have our different way of going about this.
If you want to work directly with filmmakers and celebrities, produce content about festivals, films, or the people who make them happen. Put your work out there, and stay focused!
I have always been interested in film, but I spent most of my years trying to be a film producer. I discovered my love for writing later in life. After I quit film production, I started making a small and not very successful blog. But then I discovered Letterboxd, a kind of “Facebook for film nerds.”. There, I wrote a short review of every film I watched, and I became better and better. I contacted one of the Norwegian film websites called Cinema, and the editor let me try my hand at reviewing press screenings. Through these and other events, I got in touch with other film journalists, and soon I moved on to my own website (FilmLore.no) and created a company around it with a friend of mine.
As FilmLore grew, I started to work with the streaming services, reviewing upcoming series, and getting to know the people working there. I started profiling FilmLore as the “best at fandom” and this led to invitations to press conferences, interviews pre-screenings, and more. This also led to me running Filmmagasinet’s website, of which the editor has contacts in every part of the international film industry.
In short: stay focused, stay the course and create your own brand. Get to know people, and be positive, friendly, and enthusiastic. When people visit a website, social media channel, or video, they need to know what kind of content this is within seconds. Otherwise, they’ll click on something else.
Kind regards,
Eirik Bull
Journalist, writer, storyteller, and editor of FilmLore.no
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