Behind the YouTube Festival in Sweden

An Interview by Thord Daniel Hedengren

I blogged about the Swedish YouTube festival over at 901am the other day, and also hooked up with the organization behind it. YouTube is so closely connected to the blogosphere that this story feels like an indication of things yet to come.

However, throwing some dirt at the concept is the fact that Piratbion, the organization that makes this happen, is known to air copyrighted movies for free. It’s basically a pirate movement that wants to spread the word for free, but that doesn’t mean that they haven’t started something possibly big.

In Sweden the YouTube festival have received a bit of media coverage. It would seem that traditional media really don’t know how to cover this, I’ve seen small notices but not much more than that.

New media sure puts things to the point where you don’t know where to go and how to react. Look at blogs and how some are looking at this phenomenon – we have bigshot journalists saying that blogs are evil, while most major newspapers do have editorial blogs online. Airing YouTube movies in a cinema in Stockholm is another thing in new media that old media will have a problem adjusting and reacting to.

So why not talk to the people behind the project? Sure, they’re a bit far from the international blogosphere (although they are blogging in Swedish), but since YouTube festivals and other ways to air user generated content publicly will be more and more common, this appealed to me.

Samira, Jesper, Karin and Alex answered the questions collectively.

First of all, what is Piratbion?
Piratbion (The pirate cinema) started as a project to screen blockbusters for free, as a reaction to the high ticket prices in Swedish cinemas. Our main goal right now is to build a mobile outdoors cinema and tour the parks in Stockholm during the summers.

You’re hosting the first ever YouTube festival in Stockholm on January 19. What made you come up with this idea?
After we began to screen movies during the autumn a feeling began to grow inside of us that it wasn’t just the high ticket prices we had a problem with. We realized that we didn’t only want free culture but that we wanted to experience it under different circumstances. So we started to experiment with other forms of watching movies, with a focus on breaking the border between the producer and the viewer. YouTube does that as well but on the internet, it’s uncontrollable, playful and interactive.

So it’s a cultural statement then? What do you hope to achieve in the long run?
We simply want free movies for both the viewers and the producers of it. That may be a cultural statement, but it’s not the statement in itself we’re after but the practice of it.

You announced the festival mid-December last year. What have the reactions been?
The reactions have been loud and disparate. The so called warez scene thinks we’re parasites, conservatives thinks we’re communists and the communists thinks we’re liberals. But still everyone wants to attend the festival.

Have you spoken to YouTube about the festival?
No, we’re not interested in YouTube as a company, we’re interested in their user produced content.

Would you say that the festival is legal? And if not, how do you condone doing it anyway?
Piratbion as a group is not that interested in the legal aspects of copyright, we’re satisfied as long as we can do things we like, that are fun and for free.

What about the users contributing to YouTube? Is it OK to deliver their content to a wider audience without their consent? I mean, it’s not the big bad evil movie industry after all…
Well we think it’s OK, otherwise we wouldn’t be doing it, and we don’t think the producers of the uploaded films mind either, as they’re already spreading it free on the internet.

It’s a sign-up process to get in, although free. How big is it going to be, visitor-wise?
The cinema we’re having the festival at has a capacity of 150 persons and that’ll probably fill up.

This is a new way to use user-generated videos. Do you see any other ways to air videos in the future, that perhaps the big media giants won’t acknowledge?
Of course there will be new ways of communication through video in the near future, but in which way is not interesting to prophesize. It could be interesting if, for instance, YouTube started to distribute their movies in a format which let the users download, recut and recreate them. Our hope is to experiment with new ways for ourselves to be more than just passive receivers of culture. After this festival we will try to take the “x-a-long” concept to new heights, starting with a cowboy shoot-a-long.

What’s the x-a-long concept?
Audience participation. We have already seen sing-a-long, the x-a-long concept is an expansion of it (like the comboy shoot-a-long we mentioned, people shoot a-long with the movie instead of singing with it).

Finally, how about sharing a given movie that you’ll air on the festival?
This clip might be hard to understand for non-Swedish speakers, but it’s one of our favorites. It’s a famous cheering song poking fun at another Swedish city in a very funny way.

Thanks to Piratbion for taking the time to do this interview with me. Check out their blog, it’s in Swedish though, so unless you speak the language of kings and heroes, you’ll have a hard time.

This Interview was published on January 13, 2007 at 8:16 am • Did you like it? Subscribe!
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