Three days in a ten-day festival is not a partial experience — it's a different problem. Here's how to solve it without spending half your time in the wrong room.
Know What You're Actually Choosing From
The full lineup of a major festival can run to two hundred films or more. Three days gives you, realistically, somewhere between nine and fifteen screenings depending on venue proximity, your willingness to skip meals, and how seriously you take sleep. That gap — between what exists and what you can reach — is where most short-stay attendees go wrong. They treat the programme as a menu to be sampled and end up with a schedule so scattered it has no shape.
The first move is a hard cull. Strip the programme down to films you would genuinely regret missing, not films that look interesting, not films critics have flagged, not the prestigious competition titles you feel you ought to see. That list is probably shorter than you think. Work from it.
The second move is geographic. Group your shortlist by venue and by rough time of day before you get anywhere near a final schedule. Travel between sites is the silent thief of a festival — a twenty-minute walk between screenings that seemed adjacent on the map will cost you the front half of the following film at least once per day. Build a schedule that moves sensibly through space, not one that looks elegant on paper.
The compression rules
cull by genuine regret, not prestige or critical noise
Group by venue and time of day before finalising any schedule
depth over breadth on a short stay
Q&As as optional extras, not obligations
sacrifice what you can recover elsewhere
Where to Compress and What to Cut
Once you have a shape, compression becomes the real craft. Three decisions matter most.
The first is the question of sections. A full-week attendee can afford to sample sidebars — the short films strand, the restored prints, the experimental programme tucked into a basement venue at noon. On three days you almost certainly cannot. Pick one section and commit to it. Depth beats breadth every time; a week after the festival, "I saw seven films from the competition" is a more useful statement than "I saw one thing from each strand."
The second decision is about the Q&A. Post-screening conversations vary enormously in what they actually deliver. On a compressed schedule, they have a real cost: forty-five minutes to an hour, plus the time it takes to get out of the room. Unless you have a specific reason to be in the room — a film that is formally unusual, a director whose working method you are genuinely curious about — it is worth planning to skip them and using that window to walk to your next screening slowly, eat something, or read the programme notes you have been ignoring. The Q&A is a bonus; your next film is the object.
The third decision is the hardest: what to sacrifice first when everything clashes. The practical rule is to sacrifice what you can most plausibly recover. A film in competition at a major festival will travel — it will screen at other festivals, it will find distribution, you will likely have another chance at it. A film in a small sidebar from a country with limited distribution infrastructure may not. When everything clashes, the rarity principle is the cleanest tiebreaker available.
The Shape of the Thing
A three-day programme works best when it has a quiet internal logic — not a theme you impose from outside, but a thread that emerges naturally from the films you have already decided you want to see. Two films with shared concerns, a third that complicates both: that is a coherent experience. It is also one you can articulate afterwards, which matters more than it sounds.
Leave one slot per day genuinely open. Not vaguely open, not "I'll see how I feel" — actually unscheduled, with two or three options already identified for it. Festival programmes shift: prints fail, illness happens, a film you caught in the first twenty minutes turns out to be exactly what you needed to see. The open slot is not slack; it is the mechanism by which a rigid schedule becomes a real one.
Three days is enough time to have a real festival experience. It is not enough time to try to have the full-week version in miniature. The attendees who leave with something lasting are usually not the ones who saw the most films — they are the ones who chose a problem worth solving and stayed inside it.