Secrets of the City

Gonna be another tough season for the Wolves. KG always speaks the truth and here’s what he had: “”We looked like a brand-new team that never practiced.”

I have been the festival coordinator for Minnesota Film Arts’ LGBT Film Festival for the past several years. To anyone reading the Mpls Metroblogging post about the festival, I would like to clarify a few things. Firstly, it is entirely untrue that we had a program set up for this year, and that we had invited filmmakers. We never got beyond soliciting tapes for the program. The non-profit arts funding landscape is incredibly tight, and major corporations such as the one that used to fund the festival require complex and time-consuming request processes. The suggestion that an organization can simply ask for funding at the last minute from a major corporation who set their funding budgets and deadlines at the beginning of their fiscal year is incredibly naive. Funding for this festival has been increasingly difficult every year, and when our lead sponsor pulled out (on a somewhat last minute basis) we simply couldn’t afford to mount the costs of what is a very expensive festival. If our earned revenue (ticket sales) numbers were higher, it might be possible to continue. However, sadly, they can’t sustain the festival alone, even when subsidized by small local sponsors. The mission of the festival is very important to us, and we by no means abandon it. We incorporate that mission at our two venues that are open every night of the year and at the other film festivals we run, M-SPIFF and Sound Unseen.