The goEast – Festival of Central and Eastern European Film in Wiesbaden has announced the start of a crowdfunding campaign for its 16th edition, which will take place from 20-26 April 2016.

“In my experience, financing a festival – but also other forms of cultural events and projects – has become a harder task over the past few years,” says festival director Gaby Babic. “Public funds are stagnating or even being cut. This is partly caused by the austerity policy at the level of the German municipalities and states (or Länder). I have often heard from foundations and sponsors from the private sector that they as potential ‘donors’ receive more and more sponsoring requests each year. There is much more competition out there than there was, let’s say, ten years ago.”

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The campaign is being established through the festival's participation in the Aventis Foundation’s kulturMut initiative, in co-operation with the crowdfunding platform StartNext. 

“goEast would like to explore new sources of potential supplemental funding for its April 2016 festival week by inviting its audience, friends and fans to become stakeholders,” goEast announced in a press release and on its web page. 

“For the goEast crowdfunding campaign to be a success, as many supporters as possible need to participate between 12 October and 10 November, which would also ideally result in reaching the funding target of €20,000.”

The festival points out that it’s not only the amount of money raised that counts: the number of supporters who pledge is also crucial. If the crowdfunding effort should fall short of this goal, the festival’s ranking within the competing projects will still have an impact: the Aventis Foundation intends to make an additional €200,000 available to fill budget gaps for the most successful projects. 

“The most successful campaigns within kulturMut will be co-financed by the foundation as they close the gap between the actual funding result and the real funding goal,” says Babic. “We wanted to try it out. As a matter of fact, it is not a classical crowdfunding campaign.”