The Atlanta Film Festival just turned 50, and SaportaReport used the milestone to host a public conversation about what the next 50 years of film in Atlanta should look like. Maria Saporta and Delaney Tarr sat down with two industry veterans, Amanda Kelso and Brian Newman, both of whom have walked the festival circuit at the highest level and both of whom have meaningful Atlanta history.
Kelso served as interim CEO of the Sundance Institute and built her career through Mister Rogers' Neighborhood, Miramax, Google, Instagram, and Sundance. She was also part of the team that scouted Atlanta as a potential new home for the Sundance Film Festival, a process that gave her a working knowledge of what Atlanta has and what it does not. Newman ran the IMAGE Film and Video Festival in Atlanta in its day, then spent years at the Rockefeller Foundation fellowships and the Tribeca Film Institute in New York. He now runs his own company called Sub Genre, which works in the niche where film, branded content, and emerging distribution overlap.
The conversation, hosted at the festival, ran wide. Kelso said her time on the Sundance scouting effort left her with strong Atlanta loyalties and full confidence the Atlanta Film Festival will be running in another 50 years. Newman, who saw the festival in two distinct eras, framed the question as one of infrastructure rather than passion. Atlanta has the production base, the talent pipeline, and the city government appetite. What it needs is the year-round film culture that turns a festival week into a permanent ecosystem.
The practical takeaways were familiar but worth repeating. A festival at 50 has earned the right to think bigger than its annual program. SaportaReport's Q&A landed on the case for partnerships with the city's universities, deeper engagement with Black and immigrant filmmaker communities already producing in Atlanta, and a sharper focus on the kinds of documentary and independent work that the festival circuit still champions while the streaming platforms move on. The Atlanta Film Festival's headquarters at the Plaza Theatre on Ponce de Leon, in Poncey-Highland, remains the geographic anchor. The next 50 years, as the panel framed it, depend on what gets built around it.
