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Committing to the Vision
“What would you need from this event?”
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That was among the first questions Paul Harrill and I asked when we were invited to meet with Visit Knoxville in December 2022 to discuss the possibility of launching a new film festival. Keith McDaniel, founder and longtime organizer of the Knoxville Film Festival, had announced that he was stepping away from the fest after leading it for nearly two decades, bringing it to an end. If all of us on the Zoom meeting agreed this was a project worth taking on, then we needed to plant our flag by issuing a press release.