The people behindthe technology

Frank has worked for film festivals for more than fifteen years, and is technical producer at NFF, IDFA, Cinekid and IFFR, among others. Whenever a DCP wouldn’t play, a KDM didn’t match or a server gave up on premiere night, he was often the one who solved it, and then thought: this really has to be easier.

That has more or less become his life’s work: making film logistics faster, more efficient, easier and more fun. That last word is there for a reason: Frank genuinely believes print traffic should be enjoyable too. Filmfetch is the biggest proof of that.

When cinemas closed during the pandemic, he brought four film festivals together to go online and built a complete screening platform in three months. What began as an emergency solution became the foundation of Filmfetch. Now he wants to share the experience and technology that came out of it with other film festivals, because on your own it’s a lot less fun.

Every team needs someone who knows what everyone is working on, who has which deadline and where that one file has got to. For us that is Janneke. She keeps the team together, and because sitting still isn’t her thing, in practice she simply works on the projects herself too.

She has been working in the film world for more than fifteen years, worked at film festivals, and in her spare time she casually organises and programmes her own film screenings. When it comes to film, Janneke draws no line between work and hobby.

Frank got to know Titia at a moment that says a lot about her: she picked up the phone at half past midnight to make a KDM for a filmmaker. Not because she had to, but because otherwise that filmmaker would have had a problem the next morning. So when there was room for one support person, Frank didn’t have to think for long.

By now Titia knows the system inside out and picks up support questions as soon as they come in, often before you’ve noticed anything is up. To her, an open ticket feels roughly like a crooked painting does to the rest of us: it simply has to be put straight.

Frans has been at this a while: twenty years ago he was already working for the Nederlands Film Festival, where he built one of the first online film festivals back when “a film festival online” still sounded like science fiction. So he knows his way around the technology.

But where the rest of the team would rather be tinkering with a server, Frans is the one who likes to get out there. He makes sure people know who we are: he makes new contacts, drinks the coffee, runs the mailings and is usually the first of us you meet in person. Someone has to do it, and he actually enjoys it.

Martijn has been helping build the platform for years, and in that respect has the most staying power of all: he and his team put together the very first version when others dropped out. Without that stubbornness, Filmfetch would probably never have happened.

He is also always the first to embrace a new development, sometimes to the mild panic of the rest, who then get to find out whether it actually works. It usually does. And if it doesn’t exist yet, Martijn simply builds it himself.