Mark Finch

Mark Finch (21 October 1961 – 14 January 1995 ) was an English promoter of LGBT cinema. Having founded and expanded several international film festivals he created the first LGBT film market for distributors, sales agents, and independent film producers.

Early life Born in Manchester He then decided that it would be more appropriate to launch a specialist festival rather than overwhelm the more general Piccadilly festival with LGBT movies. In 1988 he led the launch of the London Lesbian & Gay Film Festival, now known as the BFI Flare: London LGBT Film Festival.

Finch brought his mainstream festival skills to bear upon niche festivals. He arranged pre-festival press conferences and successfully exhorted mainstream media sources to take the events seriously. He also understood what journalists needed and was happy to provide insightful, witty comments for publication.

Working extensively with LGBT filmmakers and distributors worldwide, Finch was particularly drawn to San Francisco. He moved there initially to launch and manage Frameline Distribution and then was hired in 1991 as Exhibitions and Festival Director for Frameline, running the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival from 1992 to 1994 with festival co-director Jenni Olson. He continued to write about film for a mainstream and LGBT publications including the Bay Area Reporter. With his extensive contacts and honed promotional skills he was able to effect huge increases to the number of films screened by the Festival and broaden the range of places that showed the subsequent touring programme each year. In the years of Finch's direction, festival attendances almost quadrupled to 55,000. The extended reach made the event a key international showcase for LGBT filmmakers and producers.

Recognising the difficulties in bringing LGBT films to market, Finch worked to develop the first market for distributors, sales agents, and independent LBGT film producers — however those plans were disrupted by his death. The growth of the festival under his leadership demanded an organizational step change but this increased expenses out of proportion with revenue: the festival and Frameline were soon in financial difficulties. Tess Martin was brought in as executive director in October 1994 and promptly reduced the payroll and the size of the forthcoming festival. Finch had found the financial strictures in the face of continuing growth both frustrating and depressing. This external confirmation of his concerns exacerbated his mood.

Legacy Finch was coming to the end of a course of the antidepressant drug Effexor on a reduced dose when he ended his own life unseen on a rainy Saturday afternoon. He left his leather briefcase against the pedestrian walkway railing mid-span of the Golden Gate Bridge. His office desk contained several suicide notes but his death was not confirmed until his body was found nearly six weeks later, seven miles out to sea, near Pillar Point Harbor, about 25 miles south of the bridge from which he jumped. The coroner described his body as "intact but unrecognisable". Many of his friends and colleagues were deeply shocked by his death but his close friends were not surprised by his cinematic ending. His eulogist, Jenni Olson, summed it up: "Of course, given his personality, I just thought, 'Oh, how Mark' that it would be so spectacular. He doesn't do anything in a small way." A memorial service was held at the Castro Theatre on 26 February 1995, and the 19th San Francisco Festival was dedicated to Finch's memory. A special fund was established in his name "to help support the work of emerging queer filmmakers". Ten years after his death Olson made a film, The Joy of Life, of which the second half addresses his suicide and the part played in it by the Golden Gate Bridge.

Although the loss of his unstinting support of new work was a huge blow to many LGBT filmmakers, the festivals and the market that he developed have provided an enduring structure for the promotion of such films. His body of writing continues to be cited widely and he appeared as an actor in two films: Gregg Araki's gay road romance The Living End (1992) and (posthumously) in Todd Verow's dramatization of the controversial Dennis Cooper novel Frisk (1995).

Selected works Mark Finch, 'Sex and Address in Dynasty', Screen 27(6) (Glasgow: 1986), 24-43 (Reprinted in Fabio Cleto (ed.), Camp (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan, 1999) ) Mark Finch and Richard Kwietniowski, 'Melodrama and Maurice: Homo is Where the Heart is', Screen, 29(3) (Glasgow, 1988) Mark Finch, 'George Kuchar: Half the Story' in Martha Gever, Pratibha Parmar, and John Greyson (eds.), Queer looks : perspectives on lesbian and gay film and video (New York: Routledge, 1993) Mark Finch, 'Gays and Lesbians in Cinema.' in Gary Crowdus (ed.), Cineaste's Political Companion To American Film (Chicago: Lake View, 1994).