Palm Springs Film Festival Loses Key Sponsor Just as Vision Is Realized

With record attendance, glowing reviews and a global mix of movies, the Nortel Palm Springs International Film Festival ended Jan. 20, having achieved the sweep of world cinema that organizers envisioned when the event was launched 14 years ago.

About 75,000 people saw more than 200 short or feature films from 60 countries and every continent but Antarctica. Among them was the majority of films submitted in the Academy Awards’ foreign language category.

Yet just as it found its stride, the festival lost its naming sponsor, Nortel Networks, which ended its eight-year run of donations. The company’s $360,000 contribution represented 16% of the nonprofit festival’s $2.2-million budget, leaving organizers to make up the gap in an era of corporate belt-tightening.

Mark Buford, a spokesman for the communications technology company, said Nortel had decided to drop its sponsorship because the festival is “no longer part of our ongoing business strategy.”

While corporate largesse has dwindled amid recession and post-Sept. 11 trepidation, officials say the Palm Springs festival’s growth in size and sophistication leaves it poised to win new sponsorships.

“With Nortel leaving, it’s a big void to fill, but I believe we’ll be able to fill it,” said Rep. Mary Bono (R-Palm Springs), whose late husband, Sonny Bono, founded the event in 1990.

Then mayor of Palm Springs, he sought to draw tourists to the city, and imagined a festival that would “reestablish that connection between Hollywood and Palm Springs, and with it restore the glamorous days of earlier eras,” Bono said.

The festival sets a glitzy tone with its black-tie gala on opening night; this year it honored director Franco Zeffirelli and actress Lynn Redgrave, who received career achievement awards for their decades in film.

But many say that the festival’s most passionate connections are not with Hollywood, but with, say, Hanoi, Haifa or Bombay.

Over the years, the event has evolved to embrace international film, combing the continents for their best offerings. It has made it a mission to screen every available foreign-language Oscar submission, showing 45 of 54 foreign films submitted to the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences this year, and has aired the Oscar-winning film for each of the last 12 years, said Mitch Levine, the festival’s executive director and chief executive.

“Around the world now it’s known that Palm Springs is the place to send your film if you’re an Oscar submission,” said Variety’s film critic, Robert Koehler, who covered the festival and also served on its international critics’ jury. “In a lot of cases, this is the only screening these films will get in the U.S.”

The festival’s global scope and proximity to the Academy Awards also give it a role in the “Oscar buzz,” film critics say, raising the profile of the ceremony’s foreign-language entries, which often are overshadowed by domestic productions.

“I am so in favor of anything that promotes foreign film in this country, because it’s such an endangered species, so I applaud the fact that they so embrace it,” said producer Mark Johnson, chairman of the academy’s foreign-language film selection committee.

For years, Johnson said, he took little notice of the Palm Springs festival, preoccupied as he was with Oscar screenings during the same period. But recently, he said, he’s been impressed with the festival’s approach to international cinema.

“Over the years, I’d hear more and more about it, and hear they were playing some sort of obscure Romanian movie that I thought only we knew about,” he said. “They have been very aggressive and I think enlightened about going after obscure, inspired foreign films.”

Audiences have paid attention as well. The festival’s attendance this year was 10,000 more than last year and five times that of the first event 14 years ago. Box office revenues were up 30% to more than $500,000 -- a tenfold increase over the first festival’s returns.

Amid the leaps in praise and proceeds, however, Palm Springs film festival officials now must contend with the loss of Nortel’s annual donation.

Officials with other film festivals said they have managed to retain strong sponsorships despite the recession, but added that they count themselves lucky to do so.

“As a nonprofit, you can take nothing for granted,” said Dawn Hudson, executive director of the Independent Film Project Los Angeles, which runs the IFP Los Angeles Film Festival, sponsored by Target Corp. and InStyle magazine. “The bottom can fall out any day.”

Palm Springs festival officials acknowledged that they face tough competition for new donations.

“There’s no question that, across the board, all charitable organizations are struggling to maintain and increase the funding they’re getting,” said Kevin McGuire, board chairman of the Palm Springs International Film Festival. “That’s a challenge that all charities are having on an ongoing basis, and we’ve seen that since 9/11.”

A festival’s success at securing sponsorship depends on its ability “to demonstrate a capacity to bring together a large, probably affluent audience that is culturally sophisticated,” said Stephen Gutwillig, executive director of Outfest, Los Angeles’ gay and lesbian film festival.

Palms Springs film festival officials say they are certain their audience of foreign film aficionados -- almost by definition an educated elite -- will prove attractive to donors.

“We’ve already contacted a number of potential sponsors,” McGuire said, “and are very confident that we are going to bring on even more sponsorship than we have in the past.”