Fay Darmawi is the founder and executive producer of the SF Urban Film Fest and member of our 2019 Creative Community Fellows! We recently checked in to see how her organization is doing in its mission to spark discussion and civic engagement around urban issues through storytelling, and how the greater NAS community can help support them.
What are you most proud of in your work life right now?
I am most proud of the way the SF Urban Film Fest team members work together collaboratively. We share a common vision and have known to finish each other’s sentences in group presentations. The pandemic forced us to ramp up our skill base to execute a virtual film festival in about 6 months. That is no small feat even for organizations five times our size. We were able to do it by leveraging our individual strengths and being in-tune to the limits of our capacities.
As artists and producers, we have a tendency to want to do too much, but putting limits and boundaries made us more accessible to our audiences. We limited ourselves to three types of virtual programs and made festival passes sliding scale to simplify the festival both for ourselves and the participants.
What are you most struggling with?
We are most struggling with burn-out. And I want to make clear, burn out in small arts organizations is a structural effect of the arts funding industrial complex. It’s not because we make bad choices. We burn out because we are such a small team, there is no slack or buffer.
Because we now produce programs year round, there is no break after the festival push to re-energize. We need to grow our staff and pay people better too but that takes a lot of fundraising. But fundraising is in itself a full time job but we really only have 25% capacity right now to do it. Programming, community engagement and day-to-day operations come first so fundraising gets the short shrift, which is not sustainable in the long-run. What we need is a benefactor to give us unrestricted funds to pay for a full-time development person for a year. Please let me know if you have any leads!
How can the NAS community support your mission?
The NAS community of artist change makers can support one another by rewriting the narrative on what it means to invest in community through small arts organizations, many of them BIPOC led. The mainstream narrative is that BIPOC-led small arts organizations are too risky for foundations to support; that they need to show a track record first. But how are arts organizations going to show a track record if they don’t have the resources to grow in the first place?
The truth is that the risk is in NOT investing in small arts organizations because as we have seen, going back to normal is not an option. We cannot continue on the trajectory of skyrocketing wealth inequality and racial injustice and violence. We need change. And small arts organizations are where structural change is happening on the ground in response to community needs.
At the SFUFF, we practiced equity and piloted the sliding scale passes, when international film festivals who could afford to, did not. Our festival audience is about 55% people of color and the diversity is a direct result of our centering equity and accessibility from the legibility of our web design, to the films and diverse filmmakers we feature, to the fact that our team is BIPOC representing a cross section of lived experience and community action. We embark on multi-year cross sector collaborations between filmmakers, urban planners, activists and artists.
This is deep transformational work and we need to be supported to realize the change we all want to see.
Is there anything you want to offer to this community?
I want to offer a call to action. There is no time to waste. If you have been thinking of changing the way you do business to further the goals of equity and justice, do it now. Why do the minimum? Take your chances now, the risk is in the NOT doing. And don’t do it alone – bring people along in coalitions and collaborations. These take a lot of work, but you will be a lot more effective and resilient in the long run.
Follow Fay on Instagram at @faymawi and the incredible SF Urban Film Fest @sfurbanfilmfest on Instagram, Twitter, and Facebook.
