The one vaguely democratic exhibition space is the film festival. Marketing of individual films puts them less in competition - more helpfully, usually, in playful comparison.

So, for instance, in the second year of SHORTOMATIC we programmed a retrospective of the short film work of the photographer Danny Lyon. His films have been rarely screened in the UK so we had to convince an audience to take a chance on films they may well have not already heard of. One of the ways this was successful was by drawing comparison to the other American independent film work screened at the festival. Through connection and comparison rather than competition we tried to encourage dialogue.