experience winteR in Wine CouOtry The Meritage Resort and Spa. With fantastic events, dining, room packages, spa treatments, ne wines, New Year’s Eve celebrations and more, there is simply no better place to celebrate this holiday season. Visit MeritageResort.com or call 888.780.5289 for special winter packages. SAVE THE DATE Masters and Makers @ Meritage February 13-15, 2015 The festival is now in its fourth year. How has it grown or changed since it began? Our challenge now is it’s so big—geographically. It’s thirty miles long; it occurs in four towns, over five days. We want very much to keep it intimate, personal. So, even though it’s spread out, we’ve kept it personal by creating a festival village in each town. In each town it’s all walkable. You can walk from a screening venue to a wine tasting pavilion, to a restaurant. You can go shopping and then go to an event. In terms of the growth, it’s been growing in terms of who participates on the partner side. Every year there’s more wineries involved and more restaurants. We add different elements to the food and wine. As we continue to grow, we get better and better at elevating the wine and food experience. This year, for instance, we added a culinary stage in Yountville, with chefs, mixologists and wine experts on the stage; they’re presenting something, demo’ing something. It's presented by Chef Michael Chiarello. He would charge a lot of money to do this anywhere else, but he’s been a supporter of us since Day 1, and he wants to do something for his community. In terms of audience, every year we see more film industry people and more purchases by them of the films we feature. We have everybody from the first-time filmmaker to A-list celebrities who want to come enjoy the hospitality and the very appreciative audiences here. It’s Napa Valley: laid back, but also accommodating, as well as Mike Meyers is expected elegant—perfect for film industry folks. We work with so to attend this year’s festival many generous hotels, and we're trying to figure out other ways we can host more people, such as valley residents hosting people in their homes or wineries donating guest cottages. The general consumer “film buff” audience is growing every year too, which we need it to because we have no marketing or advertising budget. We need our audience to grow through word of mouth. How do you find the films you show? We launch a call for entry in January. We bookend the year, curating the best independent films we’ve found throughout the year. Every year, more and more filmmakers submit their projects to us. At the same time we go out and research for new films based on what we’ve learned from other festivals, what films have won awards. We go back to our alumni filmmakers. Increasingly, the studios are more interested in using us as a platform to launch their films right before the awards season officially begins, which is right between Thanksgiving and Christmas. We set the film festival up in November specifically so that we could be that platform. That’s what happened with Kevin Costner—the promoter he hired to help promote his new film, Black and White. She called us and said I want to play it there, and Kevin wants to come, that movie going to play very well to this audience, generate buzz before comes out theatrically. What do you want the festival experience to be for the average attendee? Try a little bit of everything, try something new. See a documentary, if you don’t usually see documentaries. Go to a movie that nobody you’ve heard of is in. See something that makes you think—or totally entertains you and makes you laugh. Make sure you go to the wine pavilion in any town and try some amazing boutique wines. Catch one demo on the culinary stage in Yountville. And go sample something, a snack, or a meal in a restaurant that you’ve never gone to, and end the evening with a party. You can get a lot in between 10 in the morning and midnight. If you have a Pass Plus, you can’t miss the gala on Thursday night, after the Kevin Costner movie. Can you tell me a little bit about the economic impact the festival has on the valley? One of the reasons we don’t overprogram. Let’s take the afternoons, for example. We want people going to businesses, buying items, going to a restaurant, having lunch or dinner, grabbing a snack. It’s something we take seriously. We work hard to send the message to our consumers, “Enjoy the valley businesses and restaurants while you’re here for the film festival,” and we will continue to track that data every year and show that to our partners. 20 www.nAPAVA L L E Y L I F Emagaz ine.com
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