Veronica Miles has spent over 25 years inside the business of film exhibition, running festivals, theaters, and now the American launch of a ticketing platform. On this episode of Ilse Will Say, she and Ilse get into film festival strategy, the reality of building a career in independent cinema, and why New Orleans might be running its own kind of energy audit on everyone who moves there.

Veronica walks through how a scholarship to a film camp in Tuscany as a teenager shaped her, and the surprisingly emotional layers underneath a trip she took back to that same small town decades later. She and Ilse dig into the unglamorous side of submitting to film festivals, how to actually pick which ones are worth your money, and what she's learned helping select mentees for Cinema Femme. Veronica also opens up about the short film she made about her grandmother, shot entirely on her phone during Mardi Gras, and gets into the specific kind of energy she thinks New Orleans holds onto. Find her on Instagram at @veronicalm.

In this episode:

• 00:00 What brought Veronica to New Orleans
• 03:16 How a public school film class turned into a career in film exhibition
• 05:43 Splitting the film industry into art and business
• 09:03 The hats Veronica's wearing right now, from arthouse cinema to Ferve
• 12:30 How to actually get audiences into theater seats
• 13:25 A real strategy for picking which film festivals to submit to
• 17:20 Hot Cakes
• 18:48 The Tuscany film camp story, and what it cost her
• 21:43 The photo of her grandmother that led to a short film
• 23:22 New Orleans, energy, and the city's "internal council"
• 27:04 Her upcoming solo travel film trilogy
• 28:13 Where to find Veronica

Mentioned in this episode:

Thank you to our sponsor, Joel Maisonet Photography: maisonetphotography.com