Arts & International Affairs: Volume 2, Number 2 | Page 27

Insiders and Outsiders at
Festivals
Hannah McGill
Hannah McGill is a film critic, writer and broadcaster based in Edinburgh. She covers arts and
current affairs for numerous outlets, including Scotland on Sunday and Sight and Sound, and she
is a regular contributor to comment and review programmes on BBC Scotland and BBC Radio 4.
Between 2006 and 2010, she was the Artistic Director of the Edinburgh International Film Festival.
She co-authored the non-fiction volume THE 21ST CENTURY NOVEL (Edinburgh University
Press 2014) about contemporary publishing and authorship. In September 2017 she will commence
study at Queen Margaret University for a PhD on the subject of film festival programming.
The line between “insiders” and “outsiders” is one that an arts festival must
negotiate in a number of ways. The idea of a festival incorporates something
that is outside the ordinary: there’s a flavour of the carnivalesque, of the
overturning of expectations of everyday life, of those who are customarily
“outside”—of work, of business, and of the expected order of things. And
yet festivals also are businesses: even the smallest and most radical ones
have to attract support, whether that is private, public, corporate, or in-kind,
and have to present themselves in such a manner as to reach and appeal to
audiences. And so, a perpetual tension exists regarding where arts festivals
belong—inside or outside the mainstream entertainment business—and
whether they speak to an already overserved cultural elite, or underserved
communities of specialists and adventurers.
In order for arts festivals to exist and fill a need, they must be seen to be
providing something insufficiently represented within the year-round
offering of cultural institutions, whether that be special collaborations and
commissions; the sheer scale of stage and audience offered at the Glastonbury
festival in the UK; or films that lack prominence within standard distribution
channels plus appearances by filmmakers at a film festival. There’s also
community, of course—a group of likeminded people experiencing unusual
access to its shared interest, often lubricated by organized opportunities for
social encounters and the professional and creative opportunities it fosters.
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