The festival launch was spread over a few weeks as our timeline was a bit too optimistic, but once we got there, the excitement of putting on a film festival began to truly sink in. Reflecting on Jessica’s McGoff’s video essay Screening Room: on digital film festivals and Eric Kohn’s 2021 article for IndieWire allowed me to consider differences between curation and algorithms, and how exhibitions of film festivals can shift with alternating contexts.
McGoff considers digital space as an ever-growing monoculture, which in the context of film festivals, offer greater accessibility through online viewable programmes (2021). While soft-launching DIFF, questions surrounding accessibility arose for myself and likely many others in the studio. How do we want to advertise ourselves? Does our mission statement reflect our online presence? An Instagram page for DIFF was made by the social media team, the first post entitled “coming soon.” I don’t think we’ve really wrapped our heads around what’s “coming” as the festival has become an ever-changing and growing project, with different ideas sprouting from other ideas each week.
Maya and I wrote up a call for submissions with the programming team for our FilmFreeway page and tweaked the list of rules to make them as accessible as possible, while really selling the fact that Opening Night will be held at The Capitol. The FilmFreeway page went up a couple days after the Week 7 Friday class, as FilmFreeway had to verify that we’re a real festival (whatever that means), and now we’re live, awaiting submissions. Previous studios had to move their programmes online in adherence of the 2020 and 2021 lockdowns, but the flexibility it offered audiences is an important take away and MOFF (2021) had great reach via social media, with recognition from other running festivals.
Since the pandemic, traditional film viewing practices in a festival context have shifted dramatically. The idea of cinema-going that we’re familiar with is sitting in a dark room amongst other people with a screen before you (McGoff J, 2021), but this mode of film viewing wasn’t available for film festivals during lockdowns. As both McGoff and Kohn explore, once grand events became something available to people from their own living room, and as for Sundance 2021, “$25 and an internet connection” was all you needed to attend (Kohn E, 2021). Perhaps this isn’t a bad thing though, with a chance for thoughtfully curated film programmes to garner attention amidst online spaces configured by algorithms.
References
McGoff J (2021) Screening Room: on digital film festivals (video essay), Glasgow Short Film Festival.
Kohn E (2021) How to Socialize at Sundance 2021 from Your Living Room, IndieWire. https://www.indiewire.com/features/general/how-to-socialize-sundance-2021-1234610930/