Festivals Of The Present, Festivals Of The Future

Panel Talk

2020 has been a disruptive year for the short film festival ecosystem. The unexpected Covid-19 pandemic in March has forced most organisations to postpone, move online, or cancel long-time scheduled events. Many festival organisers immediately managed to successfully respond to this new situation and to adapt their events to an all online reality. Others postponed the festivals, hoping for more favorable epidemiological conditions from August onwards to make a hybrid or “on-site” version viable.

Unfortunately, as the pandemic’s situation keeps evolving, event organisers set to happen in the last three months of the year once again have had to face worse sanitary conditions. These rapid changes have created new challenges and issues that festival teams had to tackle, such as health safety measures or rethinking schedules and programming for a new format. Although uncertainty for the upcoming 2021 season is still very much present and real, how will festival producers prepare for it? How will past experiences and recently learned expertise help shape future short film festivals? Will hybrid festivals remain prominent? And what does that mean for the film curators and distribution sector?

This panel, including Eroll Bilibani (Dokufest), Lars Henrik Gass (Internationale Kurzfilmtage Oberhausen) and Nina Rodrigues Lima (Guanajuato International Film Festival), aims to answer all these questions on the organisational issues, changes, and challenges the short film festival ecosystem might face in a post-pandemic world. Moderated by Talking Shorts’ Emilia Mazik.