3.31.2008

Festival censorship

A film festival is a place you don't usually expect to encounter any sort of suppression of artistic expression. However I've got an exclusive look at the cover of 2 different versions of a festival paper which were printed recently.

I think it gets a bit trickier when you put out printed materials, online and in the theatres you can do what you want but when you print something out and throw it into a person's hand things can get a bit dicier. We had a minor controversy at my festival last year over a bit of printed material, our quickguide went out with this photo in it, showing the naked posteriors of two young ladies:


And we had the local supermarket stuffing these in shoppers bags. So someone called up and complained and the supermarket pulled all the quickguides. I guess they trashed them.

So this year in Dallas, they had to trash a bunch of copies of their daily news because they had printed them with a slightly racy photo on the cover. I've spoke with a few staff here about this and its actually not as reactionary a move as I first believed it was. There are mitigating factors which make me understand the decision to destroy one printed version of the paper and replace it with a new one. Here are the two covers:
One of my favorite movies we showed at my festival a couple years ago was the documentary FUCK. Throw that on your netflix list for sure, it's a very smart and very entertaining examination of modern censorship. We were a bit worried we might not be able to print the full title of the film on our materials, but we did! I would have thrown a big fit if that had been held back for sure.

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