What might the International Film Festival look like in 2020?
From households to corporations, no one who manages anything in Chicago this year can predict what October might mean for the arts and culture industry, for schools, for sports, for retail, for the economy — for our lives.
Take, for example, the Chicago International Film Festival. Artistic director Mimi Plauche and managing director Vivian Teng continue as heads of the annual nonprofit Cinema/Chicago marquee event. This year, though, they may be overseeing an allvirtual, online festival. With no use for an actual marquee.
Opening Oct. 14, the 2020 festival, Plauche said Wednesday in a Zoom interview with Teng, will likely feature 60 to 70 new titles, roughly half of the usual number of films. That’s less of a reduction, for the record, than other late summer/early fall festivals, notably the Toronto International Film Festival, currently scheduled for a partly in-person, largely online iteration Sept. 10-20.
Toronto typically programs 300-plus features; this year, like its early September predecessor, the Venice International Film Festival, it’ll land somewhere between 50 and 60.
With widespread travel bans, and the eyes of much of the rest of the world on America’s persistent COVID-19 positivity rate and fatalities, these starry festivals will necessarily shift into regionalist mode. But there’s a window of opportunity. The programmers and managers looking a little further out, and embracing the online concept of festivalgoing,
consider this “an audience-building moment,” Plauche says.
Nothing’s off the table yet, according to Plauche. Chicago’s festival may include an outdoor screening component. If so, the event would partner with one of the many Chicago area drive-ins dotting the map this season, while virtually all indoor screening venues — with the conspicuous exception of the Music Box Theatre — remain closed. An outdoor venue, Plauche says, “is an option we’re exploring.”
With the city’s Phase Four restrictions on seating capacity, the festival’s longtime indoor home, the AMC River East 21 in Streeterville, feels like an iffy prospect for an October reopening.
Plauche strikes a mixed note of realism and optimism. “Talking with festival directors and programmers in other countries,” she says, “all working with different, limited capacities depending on their local regulations, there still seems to be a strong desire to be back together in a theater. When we’re able to do that safely, it’ll be a valuable experience.” For now, she said, “the top priority is the safety of our audience.”
If the festival’s 2020 edition ends up being 100 percent digital, she adds, “the good news is, we’re still seeing good films. So we’ll be selecting (the lineup) from a broad range of work from around the world, as well as from what we’re seeing locally, which is a dramatic increase in high-quality productions coming out of Chicago.” Teng said the festival expects to announce format details, plus some keynote speakers for this year’s online “Industry Days” event, by mid-August.
The major stops on the international festival circuit are all dealing with 2020era Pandemia differently. The Cannes Film Festival, held in May, canceled due to the coronavirus pandemic, though it later announced 56 films chosen for the 2020 “Official Selection.” Among the titles: Wes Anderson’s “The French Dispatch,” featuring everyone from Bill Murray to Frances
McDormand to Timothee Chalamet.
In early July, organizers of the Venice, Telluride (Colorado), Toronto and New York film festivals went public with an agreement to lay off the usual jockeying for world premieres. A few days later, Telluride officials rethought it. Given “the seemingly unending number of new cases of COVID-19 and the national chaos around it,” the boutique Colorado festival statement read, “even the best strategy is threatened by this out-of-control environment.”
Planning, some say carelessly, for a different sort of environment, the Venice festival plans some in-person screenings with the help of two new outdoor venues, one located in a skating rink. Similarly, Toronto has scheduled some socially distanced in-person screenings, the rest to be presented online.
Robert Koehler, a longtime film journalist, critic and a former festival programmer at AFI Fest Los Angeles and the Film Society of Lincoln Center, looks at the question of in-person vs. online festival-going as a pretty simple one.
“I don’t think there’s any way we’re going to have (an) American film festival this year,” Koehler says. “What feeds my skepticism is this: There have been enough mistakes made along the way, and there’s enough doubt and legitimate fear among the public, to warrant it. And say we do get a vaccine widely perceived to be safe, so that people feel secure enough to go back into enclosed spaces. I still think American festivals are screwed, because in America, a vaccine may not be widely embraced.”
That leaves one viable option, Koehler says. “From the filmmakers’ standpoint, do you want your movie premiering virtually rather than theatrically? No. But do you want it to sit on the shelf? No.” The U.S. film festivals, he says, “will have to reconceive what they do and how they do it. And the ones in a position to thrive are the ones, like the Sundance Film Festival, that are way out in front with their online platforms.”
Chicago festival artistic director Plauche remembers the moment, one day in late February, when she was attending the massive Berlin International Film Festival and, in a flash, she had a clear vision of things to come.
She was in a meeting with representatives of the Filmitalia distribution firm, regarding a movie she’d just seen, Matteo Garrone’s live-action “Pinocchio.” The press conference for the film was underway. Then it took a hard right turn. News of the rapid spread of COVID-19 was just breaking worldwide, news of Italy’s worst outbreaks. Suddenly nobody was talking about “Pinocchio” anymore.
“Up until then,” Plauche says, “we were all in denial.”
The Chicago festival staff has the same five full-time staffers it had a year ago. In addition to Plauche and Teng, there’s marketing manager Andrew Van Beek; programmer Sam Flancher; and sponsorship manager Jackie O’Connor. Various seasonal hires, many with long affiliations with the festival, are returning as well, including programmers Anthony Kaufman and Joyy Norris.
The festival budget will be smaller this year, due to the “scaled-back nature” of a largely or all-digital festival roster, says Teng. But most of the steady donors and festival underwriters, she says, “understand the situation.” She acknowledges that some sponsors “are going through some tough times.”
Says Plauche: “As we go through this year’s festival, and create an enhance online experience, and try to give everybody the best possible festival within the limitations, will this change what a festival looks like, period?” After a second’s pause, she answers her own question. “I think it will.”
By mid-August, Chicago International Film Festival offficials expect to announce more details regarding the Oct. 14-25 incarnation. The first of the major fall film festivals, in Venice, Italy, resumes operations Sept. 2-12. For more information, go to chicagofilmfestival.com.