Now in its 27th year, the Newport Beach Film Festival (NBFF), in the Orange County coastal city of Newport Beach, about 40 miles southeast of Los Angeles, runs from October 15 to 22.
Co-founder and CEO Gregg Schwenk talks to Screen about how he works to position the film festival in awards season, why he believes local audiences have embraced the event and what he means when he describes it as the “top luxury film festival in the US”.
How has the Newport Beach Film Festival evolved over the past quarter century?
We have grown into the largest celebration of cinema in coastal Southern California, larger than anything in San Diego, Orange County or Los Angeles County. We will traditionally screen about 120 feature films and 270 short films. We host about 18 special events, ranging from smaller receptions of 200 people to our opening-night gala, which is almost 3,000 people. We’re probably going to hit about 50,000 people attending this year.
Who is your core audience?
Definitely our Ampas [Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences] and guild members, industry people who either live here permanently or have second homes in Orange County and Newport Beach. And it’s people who are passionate about film. They are engaged with the greater community and they want the films they’re seeing to be home runs. They’re rooting for the film that they’re going to see - and that’s not always the case when I go to see films up in LA.
What do you believe are the festival’s particular strengths?
We’re the top luxury lifestyle film festival in the US. We play into the aspirational lifestyle of Southern California. The theatres the festival takes place in have incredible, cutting-edge technology and beautiful locations. The films are either world premieres, North American premieres, or they’ve come from major festivals around the world. We’re a festival of discovery, with 125 features this year and films from about 45 different countries. We’re very proud of the calibre and quality of our programming.
You programme a number of awards contenders. What are your conversations like with distributors and studios about those films?
They understand the importance of the festival now and the ability to get in front of voters that aren’t coming up to LA that often. And they see the partnerships that we have with all the major trade publications. There’s just so much going on in Newport Beach that it’s become a must-stop on the festival circuit.
Two months before the festival, we’re meeting with all the major strategists and going over what role Newport Beach can play in helping with their overarching campaigns.
The festival is an opportunity, especially from the standpoint of films being positioned for the shortlists [the lists, released by Ampas in mid-December, of titles still in contention in Oscar categories including international feature and documentary feature]. Because there aren’t that many larger festivals that are able to celebrate the films before the shortlists are created.
What do the world premiere selections at the festival offer your audience?
From the industry perspective, a salesperson or distributor going down to Newport Beach to see a world premiere is an exponentially more efficient use of time and money than going to some other festival around the world. A lot of distributors are coming to realise they can go down to Newport Beach and spend a couple of days and find films that no one else has access to yet.
Your selection of international films has grown over the years. Which festivals do you and your programmers attend and when do you start curating the selection?
We’ll have programmers at Tribeca, Berlin, Sundance, Karlovy Vary, Munich, Cannes and Toronto. We try to make sure we’re talking with all the international film offices and the major international distributors and looking at films very early in the process.
The films in our international spotlight section range from what we feel are going to be crowd-pleasers all the way through to the submissions for the best international film Oscar. We are trying to find films that will resonate with our international communities here in Southern California and we work very closely with organisations and institutions within those communities to engage with their memberships and to alert both the expatriates and the true cinephiles about the films from their country.
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