Christopher Escobar

Executive Director, Atlanta Film Society

After a series of questionable business decisions and years of mounting debt, the Atlanta Film Festival announced in 2011 the departure of its executive director. The festival owed money to many of its vendors, and without the cash to bring in new leadership, there was no timeline to replace him.

Christopher Escobar had joined the festival’s board just six months earlier.

“I was like, ‘Oh, what have I gotten myself into?’” he said. “This organization I had looked up to was in turmoil just as I was getting involved, and I thought it might just shut down right in front of me.”

Escobar was a graduate student at the time, studying production in Georgia State’s Moving Images Studies program, and he was busy with two assistantships and a job as technical adviser to GSTV. He volunteered to be a part-time managing director for the festival for a few months, until it could get a new executive director on board.

(“That was very naïve,” he said. “It was never part time.”)

He went to work to make sure the festival was complying with its existing grants, applying for new ones and engaging with sponsors. By the time the 2012 festival rolled around, it received 800 more submissions than before, increased attendance by 1,500 people and had its first surplus in a decade.

The board asked him to stay on, permanently this time. AFS moved its offices to Georgia State’s campus and began reshaping the festival from one that happened to take place in Atlanta to one that was truly Atlanta’s film festival.

“We started doing things that were less convenient and more meaningful,” Escobar said.

The festival moved screenings from nondescript multiplexes to the Plaza Theatre, the city’s oldest independently owned cinema. Parties that were once held in hotel ballrooms—“nice hotel, nice ballroom, but not one that meant anything to anybody”—are now hosted in places like Paris on Ponce and the Goat Farm. AFS incorporated more music videos, live performances and documentaries about music into the event.

Film festivals used to be about access: a festival might have had the only copy of a certain film. These days, with massive collections of digital media at the fingertips of anyone with an Internet connection, do we still need film festivals?

“To ask, ‘Why do you need a film festival?’ is like asking, ‘Why do we need a farmers’ market when we already have McDonald’s?’” Escobar said. “We see it as our job to create a space for independent artists whose voices get overlooked by Hollywood, not just ethnic voices but women, filmmakers from the American South. And for our audiences, we make sure they’re not only eating McDonald’s, that they get some other things that are good for them.”

That’s a role the festival has played for decades. It was the first festival to show Spike Lee’s work, Escobar pointed out. With the film tax credits Georgia put in place in 2008, that role is expanding, as more independent filmmakers are choosing to stay in Atlanta rather than moving to New York or Los Angeles.

The incentives have also brought “a proximity of talent,” Escobar said. Last year, James Franco was in town shooting a film during the festival, and the festival showed two of his films, including a world premiere at Georgia State’s Rialto Theatre. Franco also hosted a master class with the festival.

Still, across the country, Georgia ranks dead last in public arts funding. Escobar sees a window of opportunity to change that paradigm across the South and to leave a lasting legacy.

“If there’s an industry to do that, it’s this one,” he said. “And if there’s a place and a time to do it, it’s here in Georgia, right now.”

—Erin Crews

PANTHERS SHAPING ATLANTA'S FILM INDUSTRY