POW Interview

***This is not a perfect transcript. I couldn't record it so I took a lot of notes and wrote down a lot of quotes to rebuild it.***

Adrienne
What is your favorite thing about your festival?

Tara 
There are so many things… I enjoy the process, as in putting together a big festival every year. I just get a surge of energy promoting women directors, and women in the field in general. It gives me a sense of pride to celebrate women who are established in entertainment and women who are just starting out… like with our POWGirls festival.

Yeah about the youth festival, I just wanted to ask about that as well. I was exploring through the website and saw that you have a special category for students. You know, it is basically what Visions is about. We cater to undergraduate filmmakers because all other student categories are filled with graduate filmmakers who have a bigger budget and more experience. I wanted to know how your category works. 

We actually just started the youth festival in 2014. We were basically beta testing it then and then this past year, we had 3 sessions of POWGirl films. I am always very impresses with younger work and we do try track the ages of the girls submitting. We are actually going to be starting up a mentorship for girls just starting out. It would be for girls like you or younger who want a more formalized mentorship. 

Yeah I would absolutely be interested in that! How long have you actually been with POW?

Well I have been in entertainment for 25 years now. I worked in marketing for a studio in LA then came back here to Portland where I worked on films and local projects. Then I basically took over and rebooted POW in 2008. [I think she said it was on hiatus for a while] I really changed how it was run and remodeled everything, and I have been working on it ever since. It is basically my baby. 

What do you wish you had known starting out that you know now or what do you wish you had done differently?

Financing. I worked in entertainment for a long time doing events with gobs of money, whereas here we just don’t have that. This is very different and it does allow us to be more creative in our thinking. I have become a much stronger business owner because I run it like a business. We are not a non-profit organization. I have to be able to pay my employees and make a revenue. 

How many do you staff?

I have 2 permanent staff members year round that are paid. Right now we are looking for a fourth person to be on the team. We also have about 100 volunteers year-round to help with our pre-screenings and the festival itself.

What is the most challenging thing currently for your festival?

Maintaining growth. POWGirls is really expanding. We have a new vision that we have been working on and will be announced in March. When talking to the stakeholders, you have to keep them excited and keep them interested. Every year it’s like we are reinventing the wheel to get consistent money. We have our once a month screenings and POWGirls is getting to be year-round. We have to make sure to keep paying people  and making sure that people are responding to what we are putting out there. Will people show up? We have to make it compelling and get people to respond to our programming. It’s one thing to have people say they are interested, but it’s another thing to actually have people in the audience. 

You have to find a way to get butts in the seats. 

Exactly. If you can’t get the butts in the seats then what’s the point? 

Exactly. And that is something that we have to think about all the time as well because it is defiantly hard to do so sometimes. So when I was online, I found your mission statement and combed through the website, but how would you personally describe the mission and goals of POW?

I would say it’s an organization that is overall here to support women in the film and television industry. Specifically women directors. And that is something that I get questioned on a lot. They ask what about women producers or women centered plots. [She talked about how the statistics show that there is a vast minority of women directors and it is not because they aren’t there, they just aren’t being highlighted]. The director is the creative point, the commander of the ship. We got about 1,000 submissions last year that met that qualification so when people say there aren’t women directors, we just point to that. We are working toward this equality goal. We want to be supportive of all women in the industry. Now we have this added education component. Soon we want to be able to give complete support in terms of sponsorship. It is really evolving into more than just a festival.

So I think you actually mentioned this in that answer, but did you say you had about 1,000 submissions last year?

Yes it was about 1,000 entries for this past year which is actually double than in past years. We end up screening about 50 films a year. We take up one full theater a year, and we may push into 2 theaters. 

Earlier you mentioned getting volunteers to help with pre-screening. How do you guys go about your pre-screening process? Like how many pre-screeners do you get and how do you go about choosing who does it?

Well entries open in May. We have 3 rounds of screening. The first round is batches of 20 films. We have screeners all across the country. We call this the general audience films. We have facilitators who have groups of about 3 to 5 people over to their home to watch the films. We have them take notes and put them all in a Google Doc. [There was something else in here, but I don’t remember what she said]. We have a pretty sophisticated tracking system for our films. We have info on whether or not it passes the Bectel Test, whether or not there is a person of color in the film, what kind of storyline it is, if there is a female protagonist. We also collect demographics about the filmmakers. They send out the notes and we process everything. The ones in the yes selection move on to the 2nd round. The second round is more filmmaker screeners who know what they are talking about. We have had alumni, POW alumni for it before. This is usually just one person watching the full film. The third round is me and the programmer mainly. [I didn’t quite understand the 3rd round]

Do you use a scoring rubric for the films when screening? 

Yes it has the name of the film, the tracking number. We have them rate the film on a 1 to 5 scale for production value and story value. Then we have yes or no questions like if it passed the Bectel Test, if it was LGBT, [things like that].

Do you guys jury after pre-screening? I know you mentioned you and the programmer seem to have final say.

We haven’t quite determined the value of jurying yet. We have never had like a celebrity be a judge for the films. We think it takes away from the actual film and makes it more on who is judging the film. We have asked before how others felt about having awards and such and everyone seems to be 50/50 on the subject. Basically for us it is just everyone’s a winner!

You said that you open up your call for entries in May, right?

Yes. We start taking submissions in May and accept them until early September… Today is actually the last day for submissions. 

When do you get most of your submissions? The early, regular, late deadlines or do they come in waves?

They come in waves mostly. I mean, I am still getting submissions today since it is the last deadline. 

Switching gears, do you guys give out swag bags to filmmakers and guests? 

Oh sure. We want to make it a great event for them. We have been talking about trying to make them more personal though to the person. We don’t want them to just have a bag with random things and flyers in them. We have a lot of really great partnerships with people in the community so we are trying to incorporate that into it. You know Portland is known for it’s coffee and chocolate. We have a lot of great chocolatiers here so we want to include that kind of stuff into it as well.

Yeah I get that. I was in charge of swag bags last year and that was something I had to think about a lot. Since Wilmington is on the beach, I took mason jars and filled them with sand and painted them and everything. Granted, it was a pain and I stole a lot of sand and got paint on my carpet, but everyone really liked that gift and they were very appreciative so it was worth it! Do the filmmakers have to pay for registration to the festival or are they given passes?

Filmmakers get 2 passes to the festival and then they also get guest tickets for their individual screenings. Unfortunately, we can’t provide lodging and travel for them. That is something that we would really love to do, but it is just not always possible. We do give discounts on lodging with the local hotels that we use. 

Since I am in charge of development and sponsorship this year, I have a couple questions about that. What kind of sponsors do you try to get? Are they corporate or more local? What do you look for?

We do have some big sponsors like [New Bell?] and Luna. We want ones that are run by women or support women in this business. We have a lot of sponsors and donors who come back every year to give. We also have a membership program. We are very intentional about who we go after to sponsor us and we are very thoughtful in deciding. We want them to be in line with our core values and goals.

Obviously when it comes to the sponsorship you have the levels of perks that come with how much they gave, but do you give any other kind of perks or thank you’s to sponsors during or after the event?

Sure! We always give them the opportunity to interact with the guests, especially if it is a high profile guest, we try to have a private lunch where they can meet them. The sponsorship levels are more of a launching off point. We just kind of call them as say “Hey how’s it going? How are the kids? What can I put you down for this year?” We try to maintain those relationships. And when it comes to the levels, we try to work with them with what they are looking for in this partnership. If they don’t want a page ad, but they would rather fully cater an event with their name on it, we will work with them. We ask them what is most important to them in the sponsorship. And a lot of new sponsors will have more questions about demographics that we have to work with. 

So it’s kinda like a personalized sponsorship?

In a way. We look at what their need is and what their directive is. 

Do you use any specific programming or organizational tools? Like I think you mentioned Google Drive earlier, and that is like our best friend.

Yeah we have master sheets on Google Drive. It helps to make sure everyone has the information. We all work remotely and only come together once a week so it helps that we all have access to everything. We use Excel, Google Drive, Quick Books for the financial side of it. We are building a pretty expensive budget. The databases with Without a Box and Film Freeway help us keep pretty detailed tracking and records of everything. And really we also just have a bunch of 3 ring binders full of notes, promo materials and hardcopies of things.

Obviously you guys do a lot of community outreach with POWGirls and you mentioned your monthly screenings. What other kinds of year-round events do you have?

We do things like if a woman director is coming to town, we try to set something up with them and grab a screening. We had Kathryn Bigelow a couple years ago after her film The Hurt Locker came out. And you know she went on to be the first woman to win the Academy Award for Best Director, so we just kinda rode that one out! We always try to raise money for POW and try to evaluate the returns on those screenings. It all goes back to finding a way to get the butts in the seats. 

That is basically all my questions for you. Is there any other kind of advice that you may have for me?

When you are doing events, know the process and know the heart of it. It can be overwhelming and you may just have those days where you wonder “what am I doing here? Why am I doing this?” and that is when you need to sit back and be proud of everything your work is about and you have accomplished.