A festival programme is an argument. Knowing whose argument it is — and whether it's yours — is half the work of going.
The Programme as Position
A festival programmer is not a librarian. They are making a case: about what cinema is doing right now, what it should be doing, which traditions are worth honouring, which provocations are worth the discomfort. Every section title, every pairing of films across an afternoon, every decision to platform a certain country or form is a curatorial act with a point of view behind it. The programme is not a neutral menu. It is an argument, and you are being invited to agree with it.
This is useful. A programmer who has seen a thousand films so you didn't have to, who has coherent taste and the institutional clout to act on it, is genuinely worth following into unfamiliar territory. If a programme has a legible sensibility — rigorous about formalism, say, or consistently drawn to social realism from the global south — then a film you know nothing about, sitting deep in that programme, inherits some credibility from its placement. Trust placed in a programmer with a track record is not naivety; it is efficient use of limited days.
The practical move, then, is to learn the programmer's argument before you arrive. Reading the signals buried in a lineup — the country clusters, the section architecture, which retrospective has been chosen and why — tells you more about the curatorial position than any press release will. Once you understand the thesis, you can assess individual films as chapters in it.
How to read the programmer
The right stance: not uniform deference or uniform rejection
Programmer notes: useful for orientation, unreliable when they describe a film you didn't watch
Strong sections versus weak ones: the difference matters and is readable from the programme itself
When the Argument Stops Being Yours
But here is the other half. A programmer's taste is not your taste, and the distance between them is not always obvious until you are three films in and feeling vaguely hostile to everything on screen. The signs are worth learning to read early, because they are recoverable if you catch them in time.
The first sign is a pattern of disappointment in the section you were most excited about. One mismatch is chance. Two is coincidence. Three means the programmer's vision of that territory and yours are genuinely different, and you should stop treating their picks in it as reliable guides.
The second sign is when the framing language stops connecting. Programmer notes are a form of advocacy, and good ones give you just enough to orient you without closing the film down. When the notes start to feel like they are describing a film you would love rather than the film you just watched — or worse, when they seem to be addressing a different, more compliant viewer than you — the relationship has curdled. This is not the programmer's failure; it is information.
The third sign is subtler. Some festivals, particularly those with long histories and strong institutional identities, develop house styles that can calcify. The programme starts to reflect not a living argument but a set of received positions — about difficulty, about accessibility, about what seriousness looks like. When a programme feels more like self-confirmation than genuine curation, the time to start trusting your own instincts over the programmer's picks has arrived.
None of this means abandoning the programme. Even a programmer whose taste diverges sharply from yours is worth understanding, because their selection reveals what a serious, informed viewer with different priorities finds compelling. That is not useless. It just requires you to read the argument on its own terms rather than letting it drive your schedule.
Working With Both
The most useful position is trust calibrated by section. Most programmers are more reliable in some parts of their programme than others. A festival with a brilliant main competition and an undiscriminating sidebar is still a festival worth attending; you just stop deferring in the sidebar. A programmer who consistently finds extraordinary documentary work but whose fiction choices leave you cold is still worth following halfway.
Keep a running account — mental or written — of when their recommendations landed and when they didn't. By day two you should have enough data to know which sections deserve deference and which need you to do your own work. Building a schedule that is actually yours means using the programme as raw material, not instructions.
The programmer is not wrong to have a point of view. You are not wrong to have yours. The festival is the negotiation between them, and the best days are the ones where you chose the film yourself, on half-formed instinct, and it turned out to be the programmer's argument and your own arriving at the same place.