FILM FESTIVAL BRINGS BACK POPULAR MONTHLY SERIES
After enjoying success with its in-cinema, online hybrid approach last fall, the Calgary International Film Festival will be bringing back two of its treasured monthly film series for in-theatre and online screenings.
For now, the in-cinema portion is on hold while COVID-19 restrictions are still in place, but both the newly rechristened Top Docs series and the Global Perspective Series will eventually screen at the Globe Cinema on the first and third Wednesdays, respectively, followed by a four-day online window for each film. The series will run until June.
“We use the dial metaphor,” said artistic director Brian Owens. “It gives us the ability to dial things up or down in cinema depending on what the best practices are. That made it easy once the province decided it was time to lower capacities and shut certain businesses down for our safety. We just basically took the Wednesday nights in-cinema that would have opened this.”
The first Top Docs offering, The Reason I Jump, will screen exclusively online from Jan. 7 to 10. Directed by Jerry Rothwell, the documentary is based on the bestselling book by Naoki Higashida, a non-speaking autistic boy who wrote the memoir when he was 13.
The series began 13 years ago as Doc Soup as a partnership with Toronto-based Hot Docs. It's since been rebranded because the festival will now run the series independently.
The film festival began Global Perspectives in 2019. It will kick off with a four-day online screening of the French film The Big Hit (Un Triomphe) on Jan. 21. The comedy, based on a true story, is about an unemployed actor who stages a production of Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot through a theatre workshop he runs in a prison.
The programming criteria for both series remains consistent with past years. While some distributors and producers were initially reluctant to allow festivals to program largely online, the idea is becoming more palatable now that the pandemic is likely to enter its second year.
“So many films are going direct to video on demand now,” Owens said. “It's a little hard to just plot something onto a VOD channel if you haven't developed word of mouth. I think, realizing that's the primary way their movie is to be seen, we offer an opportunity for a few hundred people here in Calgary and around the province to have experience with the film, so when it's available on your VOD channel at a later date there's a little army of folks out there spreading word of mouth about the film. I'm confident we'll have the top-quality programming that we seek for six months for these two series.”
The film festival enjoyed success with a similar hybrid approach during its main, 12-day festival in the fall, reporting 30,720 as an estimated audience for this year. It greatly exceeded the organization's projections.
“We're going to (plan) from a place right now that the next festival is going to be similar to this,” Owens said. “If the vaccine moves faster than people are hoping, then that means we can dial up more in-cinema content or maybe we don't have to have the dynamic seating model that spreads people out. My guess is we still will, though. But whatever the procedural policies of the province are, we'll follow those.”