The Plaza and the Atlanta Film Festival GET CONNECTED
Checking in on the Plaza and ATLFF365 collaboration
- Phuc Dao
- The Plaza’s Buzz Marquee
The announcement that the Atlanta Film Festival 365 was taking over operations for the Plaza in March, was generally welcomed by the community. (Disclaimers: As Co-City Producer of the Atlanta 48 Hour Film Project (48HFP), I’ve forged a longstanding relationship with the Plaza Theatre. As the former Executive director of Atlanta Film Festival 365 (ATLFF365), I’ve had little direct involvement with the non-profit film organization since we parted ways in 2010. ) This June, we continued our commitment to premier the 48HFP screenings at the Plaza. It was my first opportunity to experience this burgeoning relationship first-hand, and to check-in on how things are developing now that ATLFF365 has had time to settle in.
What follows is from an email exchange with the ATLFF365 leadership team, Charles Judson and Chris Escobar.
1. Now that the Plaza and the Atlanta Film Festival 365 are working together, how is the relationship going? What have been the immediate benefits to this collaboration? What are the challenges to working together?
Atlanta Film Festival 365 is coming in to handle the operations and programming. As of the moment it’s still a mix of ATLFF and The Plaza staff like Jonny dealing with that. But, as of the last few weeks and months more and more of that is falling into ATLFF’s hands. So rentals, when you’re booking them now, that’s almost 95% one of us from ATLFF handling that. The biggest benefit, and this speaks to your second question, has been the response from other organizations. Many events and groups hadn’t even considered The Plaza as an option and after we announced this partnership folks started coming to us with ideas and asking about how they can rent The Plaza. ATLFF’s visibility lent to the Plaza. We’ve already seen success in that in August, we have more rentals (and revenue from those rentals) than any other month in the last two years.
The immediate benefit has been to merge our membership programs. ATLFF365 and The Plaza members now share benefits. Plaza members now get a free ATLFF365 membership and vice versa. That’s allowed us to then work more to add more values for both groups and bring in exclusive member screenings on a more regular basis. Not having our own theater has been a challenge over the years and now we have that and we can much more quickly and cost effectively put these events together. Plaza not having the access or the vision to program effective films has been it’s challenge. In July, we were able to use ATLFF365’s connections to put together an early screening of Beasts of the Southern Wild and make it free to all our members. The event was a huge success and showed the need and potential.
There’s admittedly still some growing pains. We all collectively have years of experience running festivals, events, venues, but this is still somewhat of a unique experience. So putting in the lines of communications, deciding who on programming handles working with large events and who handles week runs, etc, are still being developed as we go along.
- Phuc Dao
- Reflection
2. How has the public responded to the news? How are audiences responding?
Public and audience response has been very positive. People are really glad and excited to hear that we’re joining with the Plaza to make this place a success. It’s little early to say if numbers are increasing overall. However, as we’ve been bringing in more events like ASIFA-Atlanta and offering Plaza and ATLFF365 members more screenings, we’ve seen individual screenings bring in larger audiences. On many weeks and days it’s brought a new level of energy.
3. For those attending films at the Plaza, what changes and improvements are the evident result of this partnership?