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In any other year, the first night of the Berlin film festival would see crowds packing into the Berlinale Palast, the giant cinema off the Potsdamer Platz that acts as the festival’s main hub. But like every other film festival, Berlin has been forced to completely rethink itself in the wake of the coronavirus pandemic.
The major festivals have taken different approaches. Sundance and Toronto opted to move most of their activity online – albeit with limited “in-person” screenings – staging digital premieres and events. Cannes, with its commitment to the cinema experience, decided to cancel rather than stream its films, and has pushed its next edition to a more audience-friendly summer time-slot. Berlin has chosen a middle way: this week sees a “virtual” event for press and industry representatives, featuring digital screenings of its selected films, followed by a “physical” event in June, Covid restrictions permitting.
Organisers were torn to lose the buzz and excitement that is a key part of the live festival experience. Carlo Chatrian, Berlinale’s artistic director, says the decision to split the festival into a press/industry event and a public one was down to its connection with the local audience. “We are so closely related to the place where the audience is based that we felt the best option was to ask them to wait a bit to benefit from an in-presence event.” He added that one of the festival’s main goals is to support cinemas in Berlin and throughout Germany.
So what can Chatrian expect from a virtual festival? If the experience of Sundance in 2021 is anything to go by, digital screenings can significantly increase audience figures. Sundance recorded more than two and a half times the viewers, compared to the previous year’s cinema-based format. This is born out by the Glasgow film festival, currently in the middle of its run, which also decided to opt for a virtual format. Allison Gardner, the festival’s CEO, says “ticket buying has so far exceeded our expectations”, with the festival more than doubling the audience for its opening film, the Korean-American drama Minari, selling over 1,400 tickets for an event that would normally show in a 600-capacity cinema. Virtual screenings present their own difficulties, however: films are geoblocked to the UK to prevent clashes with overseas distributors, and audience numbers are limited to prevent overexposure of individual titles. “It wouldn’t be fair to the film-makers otherwise,” says Gardner.
Like Berlin, Glasgow is committed to reaching a wide audience: Gardner says: “We have a lot of free screenings because we are trying to break down barriers, and we also work with young people, we have a lot of community engagement. That’s very, very difficult to replicate online.”
Rich Cline, chair of the London Critics’ Circle, agrees that virtual festivals don’t have all the answers. “There are some obvious benefits,” he says, “which gives the films and the festival itself a much wider base of coverage. On the other hand, watching these films at home, even on a large TV screen, is simply not the best way to experience them. The biggest sacrifice is the communal thrill of a live audience’s reaction to seeing something unexpected for the very first time.”
He adds: “Even after pandemic restrictions are lifted, it might be an experience that’s either lost forever or limited to a lucky few from now on.”
One way forward for the virtual festival could be the same as Cheltenham film festival, which used its experience as one of the first events to make the leap to digital by configuring its streaming platform YourScreen to act as a distributor/exhibitor for films that would otherwise be unlikely to get a UK release. Leslie Montgomery Sheldon, director of both YourScreen and the Cheltenham film festival, says they took the step “based on the positive feedback we had from members of the public who attended our online film festival in June 2020. We were told they would like to have the opportunity to watch new films and good independent films online.” YourScreen shows around 10 films over two months, via a revenue-share partnership with real-world independent cinemas, not unlike the popular independent-film platform established by Modern Films. Sheldon says that, so far, their best performing titles have been the otherwise unheralded Canadian film And the Birds Rained Down and a Polish film called Supernova, not to be confused with the Colin Firth/Stanley Tucci drama. Sheldon says it is financially viable and after the pandemic they plan to keep going. “We are here for the long term.”
In Glasgow, Gardner is similarly optimistic “We’ll look at the positives and see what we can embed next time. It’s about learning the lessons and looking at the opportunities to engage. I don’t think there’ll be any return to business as usual, to be honest – but I’m still desperate to get back into a cinema.”
The Berlin film festival runs 1-5 March, and the Glasgow film festival until 7 March
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