From the lens of a film festival volunteer

Engaging insights at the movies and with audiences during and after the 26th annual Wisconsin Film Festival this past April.

For the adventurous film fan in Madison, it’s an increasing challenge to balance a budget with seeing everything in a given month. Trips to Chicago, or even Milwaukee, aren’t always feasible. Free screenings at UW Cinematheque aside, the biggest bang for your buck isn’t the AMC Stubs program. It’s volunteering at the annual Wisconsin Film Festival, which I did for the second consecutive year this past April. In exchange for 12 hours of working at one (or more) of the venues during its eight-day stretch, the festival offers six free tickets to any screening of your choice. For those like me who aren’t in a position to purchase an all-festival pass but still want to see a number of films, it’s a hard deal to beat. 

It’s valuable for non-monetary reasons too, of course. The film festival is one of the best places to take in and enjoy features you won’t see anywhere else on the big screen with your fellow Madisonians. Over the course of the three days I worked and five days I was able to attend films, I began to recognize the people eagerly lining up for screenings or sitting next to me in the theaters. We commiserated over rainy intervals between screenings outside certain venues (thank you, unpredictable spring weather) and puzzled over inexplicable turns of plot (and thank you, Evil Does Not Exist). It’s a nice reminder when multiplex screenings can feel so cavernous that hunger for communal entertainment is still alive and well.

I did two four-hour shifts at the new-to-the-fest screening venue UW Music Hall, a gorgeous proscenium-style theater on campus that’s home to the University Opera. Many of the films that the festival programmers selected for the space involved music in some way, such as the recently restored African musical West Indies (1979) and the recent documentary Ennio (2021), about the renowned composer, Mister Morricone. I hope the fest continues this charming concept in future years, even despite the building’s unanticipated quirks (a banging radiator being the most disruptive during the otherwise sustained calm of concert film Ryuichi Sakamoto | Opus on Sunday morning). All volunteers go through training at their assigned venue that includes walking through the building to learn about emergency exits, disabled accommodations, and how to answer the most popular question, “Where is the bathroom?” (though “Can I eat in there?” runs a close second), but not all challenges can be accounted for ahead of time.

While I didn’t volunteer at Flix Brewhouse, another new venue for the fest in 2024, things seemed to run smoothly from my seat in the house. It’s there that I saw two of my favorites of the entire festival, including Spanish legend Victor Erice’s Close Your Eyes (2023) and Alice Rohrwacher’s sublime La Chimera (2023). While these two films couldn’t be more different in tone, they both find uniquely cinematic ways to resolve their central mysteries with ravishing endings. Luckily, because it’s a more modern multiplex space, Flix’s reclining chairs were comfortable, since both of these films ran well over two hours. This seemed to be something of an ambitious trend among the selections this year. Aside from those two, there was Green Border (152 minutes), the aforementioned Ennio (156 minutes), and About Dry Grasses (a whopping 197 minutes). 

Perhaps the fest’s most divisive film, Do Not Expect Too Much From the End Of The World (2023), was also a buttnumber at 164 minutes. The crowd at my Saturday night screening at the Bartell Theatre was audibly nonplussed by this abrasive and demanding film from Romanian director Radu Jude. At one point, the older man next to me even pulled out his smartphone to take pictures of the screen for reasons that remain unclear. (While it’s inconsiderate behavior, Jude might be the one director who wouldn’t object to such an interaction with his work.) I overheard another patron grouse, “I’m just glad it’s over,” following the 30-plus-minute continuous shot of a work-accident commercial being made in real time that ends the film.

While End Of The World is unlikely to win one of the festival’s audience awards (and it was recently revealed that it didn’t), I’m grateful that it was included in the offerings this year. Of the seven films I took in, End Of The World was the only one clearly set in the immediate present.  Both its length and deliberate pacing felt like a defiant response to a shift in cinemagoer expectations over the past couple post-pandemic years, making explicit demands on our attention and time. But an art-house film can be as much of an event as a superhero one. As long as directors like Jude and Erice and Rohrwacher keep making them, I’ll keep making space on my calendar. Eleven months is a long time to wait, but I’ve already got the next festival on it, too. I’ll see you there, and remember to be nice to your volunteers. You might end up seated next to them.