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This time last year, Tabitha Jackson was gearing up to host her first Sundance Film Festival — and she was preparing to host the first Sundance Film Festival during a global pandemic.because Coronavirus disease, the 2021 festival is held entirely online, with each film as well as filmmakers Q&A and panel discussions online. then, jackson told me, which was an experiment, not so much a blueprint for the festival as an “opportunity to gather evidence for what we might want to see”. Earlier this month, she applied those lessons. Among the plans for the 2022 virtual live mixing festival, Omicron Cases surged. Sundance will go fully virtual again.
This time, though, Jackson and her colleagues were ready. Since they hosted the festival online last year, they knew what to do. When planning this year’s festival as a hybrid event, they found that most of the mechanics of moving to streaming were in place. When the activity launched last night, it was almost seamless. Next week, the film will stream online, the Q&A will take place via Zoom, and attendees looking for the social side of the festival will be able to hang out in a virtual spaceship — one could easily call it a “metaverse-ian,” but no — screenings Central to the post-conversation. (Yes, you can get into virtual reality.) “The most redeeming thing is the online platform,” Jackson said of the game planning pivot in the later stages of the festival. “A huge silver lining is that we can have a festival that we’re still excited about.”
Amid the pandemic, events of all kinds face upheaval — concerts, conferences, Awards ceremony, a Broadway production. But for film festivals, the industry ecosystem they belong to was undergoing a dramatic shift even before the coronavirus hit. In the past, a festival would show dozens of independent films, and studios would show up, buy the best ones, and release them around the world. in the theater. Around 2016, start to change. Suddenly, Netflix and Amazon started showing up with their seemingly bottomless bank accounts. They’ll snatch up holiday favorites for eye-popping prices and put them on their streaming services. Maybe they’ll release in a few theaters for prestige, or if they want to make them eligible for an Oscar. Since films shown at film festivals may end up with weekend premieres on your iPhone, does it matter if the film festival that launches them happens on a bunch of laptops?
Yes, not at all. Yes, the relationship of audiences to movies is changing – people are now quite used to using multiplexes and home theaters interchangeably. But so is the relationship between filmmakers and the people who consume their work. Directors like Dennis Villeneuve and Christopher Nolan may have reason to loudly insist that their films be released in theaters, but these filmmakers are a far cry from the indie directors who just want their films to be seen by audiences . anyoneThe festival gave them a way to do that, but when the festival went live, what they lost was the opportunity to see how people were reacting in real time – to feel the room.
Shari Frilot thought a lot. She has been curating Sundance’s New Frontier project for 15 years and has seen it grow from a handful of interactive performances and virtual reality projects to a staple of the festival. The spaceship exists in large part because she wants people to have a virtual platform, no matter the format of the festival—and it comes in handy when the event goes live. She pointed out that when a movie is shown, filmmakers often know very little about how the audience is feeling, aside from a few reviews and a few data points. So for her, conversations at film festivals are crucial, even online. “We built a room, a platform, that could hold hundreds of people talking about these films at a time,” she said. “Without the lockdown, we wouldn’t have discovered this really important work to keep up with the pace of movies online.”
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