Festival Programming As A Call To Action With COVEN Film Festival Programmer Faridah Gbadamosi

A conversation with Faridah Gbadamosi, Director of Programming for this year’s COVEN Film Festival opened up with two women situating themselves in the conversation: Faridah as a black woman of first generation Nigerian American parents, and this writer as a festival correspondent born with white privilege covering COVEN for Film Inquiry.

What we acknowledged explicitly between us is an appreciation for COVEN’s bright-line focus on women & non-binary filmmakers and for programming organized, not around who filmmakers know, but what they know and feel in cinema that counts for audience and cultural engagement! The three-day weekend cinema fest took place in San Francisco’s Mission District with screenings at the iconic Roxie Theater.

Faridah Gbadamosi is clear that the emphatic message of her cannot be overstated: film festival programming needs “to change the default of how cinema tells stories,” and how audiences view reality.

“If a writer writes the location in a script and uses the word ‘home,’” says Faridah, “how I’d see a home is different from how you’d see a home.”  According to her, changing the default assumptions in cinema storytelling involves every member of the crew– from set design to who is behind the camera.

“I was lucky,” Faridah claims, “My background did not program me the way others [from the white cisgender dominant culture’s viewing experience] are programmed.”

Twice during the interview, I mistook Faridah’s use of the word ‘cinematic’ for ‘somatic,’ a word relating to the body rather than the mind, and I commented on it the second time it happened in my hearing of her comments. She went with it immediately, describing how she sees COVEN Film Festival’s vision aligned with her own, “not as something passive, but as an active experience.”

“You can coven anytime,” Gbadamosi, turned the noun into its action word, “any time that you actively look for it. Where are the festivals, television, programs that diverge from the white male cisgender storytelling?”

Her eyes are dancing with enough light to shoot night for day and her hands are in motion, synced up with the sound of her words.

“It takes action to engage with cinema that represents different points of view. COVEN Film Festival is not asking  you to solely [sit and] view the films that they have sought out. This festival wants you to engage: go out toward it!”

About the filmmaker-focussed mission at COVEN, Faridah describes how isolating it can be for film creatives who do not fit into the funding pipeline. “COVEN is supporting the experience of belonging,” says Gbadamosi, “Everybody has a right to belong.”

The conversation wove around the thread that the traditional limited view of white cis-gender-dominated media has eclipsed everyone’s cognitive perception of reality, including that of the dominant makers and juries themselves. Like a conscious and unconscious psyops for patriarchy and white supremacy, one point of view on the world is an inexcusable way to program the realities of that world.

Our conversation turned back to somatics and the body. Gbadamosi asked, “How can we find a solution to thinking with the old constructs from within those same constructs when it’s all we get?”

If neurological pathways are made and reinforced by impressions made by media, then changing the distorted messages of one pale and power hungry world to multidimensional and diverse ways that human experience is embodied changes the body of the world. Falling in love with voices and visions from women and non-binary creators, as those represented by COVEN’s programming is to fall in love with humanity, not just the mirror image of oneself for whoever is watching.

“Creating is inherently human,” says Gbadamosi. By valuing the diverse nature of its  filmmakers, COVEN is committed to creating an inclusive world. When outliers to the dominant culture see their secret of not fitting in represented on screen, we are no longer outliers to one another, we belong.

“I love this team,” Faridah says, referring to COVEN’s Co-Founder and Festival Director Cameo Wood and Co-Founder and Festival Producer Connie Jo Sechrist. Gbadamosi spoke about how intersectionality is practiced during all discussions surrounding the festival when it comes to agism, race, gender, and class converging to tell stories that have always existed, but seldom been told.

Hearkening back to her academic focus on health policy, Gbadamosi envisions a future when toxic masculinity, the legacy of patriarchy is transfigured by active engagement with the power of media to change perceptions through stories told by women and non-binaries.

Gbadamosi expressed feeling grateful for what she has learned as a POC programmer from great role models, including Tribeca’s Loren Hammond, and she mentioned the burgeoning example of Sundance-launched Programmers of Color Collective.

“The funding challenge for women and non-binary filmmakers inadvertently results in a qualitative distinction of films she screened for COVEN, including those that did not make it into the festival.”

There was a difference in what was witnessed during the weekend-long COVEN Film Festival, how the synapses snapped for this writer, and new neural pathways were being formed. Faridah Gbadamosi was opening doors on the way in and the way of San Francisco’s Roxie Theatre. With programming that challenges embodied engagement and alliances, she enlivens while she walks her talk. Like a festival programmed by her, a conversation with Faridah Gbadamosi welcomes the listener into belonging, not to a rigged and frenzied human competition, but to a planet of home.

COVEN Film Festival took place January 10-12, 2020 in San Francisco, CA.