Helping AFI Fest Secure Its Niche

Christian Gaines is trying to explain cricket to a fellow American.

"It's really an easy game," says Gaines, 35, who was born in Belgium and educated at British prep schools.

"The object of cricket is to get the most runs, and you do that by hitting the ball far enough so you can run backwards and forwards," he says with a smile. "Every time you run this way, that's one run. You have six balls to an over. Every over, there is a mirror image. Everyone swaps sides. The bowler goes from one end to the other. The batters move from one end to the other."

Got that?

Gaines concedes that his European upbringing gave him a greater understanding of the rules of cricket than, say, baseball, or American-style football, where the object of the game often seems to be stamping an opponent into the sod--or, at least, the Astroturf.

But if Gaines thinks he has a challenge explaining the rules of cricket to the uninitiated, think of the task that lies ahead in his new job: director of the AFI Los Angeles International Film Festival.

In a world bursting at the seams with film festivals--where every corner of the globe from Avignon to Zanzibar is toasting independent filmmakers and their craft these days--playing the festival game is an ever-more daunting enterprise, even for the American Film Institute.

"I think the film festival world has changed enormously in the last five to 10 years," says Gaines, who is wrapping up his four-year stint as head of the Hawaii International Film Festival before bringing his wife and two young children from Honolulu to L.A. "There are more film festivals now in the world than there ever were and more being added all the time."

Although Los Angeles is at the epicenter of the movie industry, it has long struggled to achieve the same status and media attention with its festivals as those in Cannes, Berlin, Venice, Toronto and Park City, Utah's Sundance.

On the local scene, AFI vies for attention with the Los Angeles Independent Film Festival, Outfest, the Asian Pacific Film and Video Festival and even the 4-year-old upstart Hollywood Film Festival.

But Gaines, ever the optimist, does not believe AFI has to slug it out mano a mano with the other festivals to achieve its goals.

"Call me Pollyanna," he says with a boyish, sun-reddened grin that reminds one of a lifeguard, "but I'm a big believer that the more ways people become interested in film and people become interested in alternatives, the better it is for everybody else.