The Future: Hybrid Festivals?

hybrid formats is in terms of programming. Combining physical and digital screenings can give the festivals a wider portfolio, as Sandra describes: “You can see it as a way to divide the program. You know which titles more people will pay to go see in the cinema, and you put the rest online; and you can have a lot of titles by dividing”.

This chance of splitting the titles seems a substantial advantage of the hybrid format. It prevents the smaller, independent festivals such as VOID from renting a cinema for a niche title that potentially a few people would go and see. By screening that niche title online, the costs will be inferior, and the viewers will likely be more, because of the abovementioned festival behaviour.

Taking VOID as an example, the festival could keep the more popular titles for the cinemas to earn money and please the audience from both sides. Once again, this advantage in terms of program flexibility recalls the significant accessibility that digital or hybrid festivals can offer by including more audiences with different tastes. A final element that highlights the hybrid festivals' advantages is that they can maintain their presence throughout the whole year, and not only in those few days when the actual festival is happening. How this can be made possible in practical terms is examined in the next paragraph.

4.4.2. How to Implement Hybrid Formats

At the present moment, hybrid festivals have already become reality, usually featuring a primary digital side accompanied by a minor physical part. However, how digital and physical can be combined in this brand-new format is a strategy that can be designed in more than one way. First of all, going hybrid may mean dividing the physical and digital screening along a time axis. This was the case for VOID 2021 and CPH: DOX, as well as many other festivals which took place during this last year of pandemic. By following the announcement of opening up the country and splitting the days of the festival into two parts, these hybrid festivals avoided a potential risk of cannibalization between digital and physical, that were not competing with each other.

On the other hand, hybrid festivals can also take place within another temporal dimension.

What emerged from my interviews is that physical and digital may also be mixed during the course of the whole year. Since, by definition, festivals are delimited in time, there is always the

risk that they might be forgotten after those few days of screenings. If this might not be the case for the leading industry festivals such as Cannes, it is relevant for independent, niche festivals such as VOID. In this sense, the hybrid format can indeed be a way to enhance the festival’s visibility during the whole year, as Stella suggests: “If we are out of this Pandemic, and we can go to the cinema, festivals should be in the cinema halls. But we can keep this digital part as a pop-up, as a secondary activity happening another time of the year.”

From an audience development eye, enhancing the festival’s presence during the year can be a critical factor in building a long-lasting relationship with loyal audiences and attracting new ones. In a way, VOID already implemented this strategy in this edition, and the results were very positive. The team organized a series of events during last Autumn in places carefully chosen based on the kind of audience they wanted to connect with: Empire Bio, Husets Bio and Absalon. As VOID’s results in terms of audience retention and development confirmed, these events turned out to be pretty successful, even if they could only be a few due to the lockdown of cultural venues in Denmark. Thus, an approach to adopt could be the inverse of what VOID did this year. Restrictions allowing, there are legitimate reasons to keep the digital for maintaining the presence throughout the year, while still keeping the few days of the festival physical. In a Pandemic situation, an interesting suggestion came from Chonie, who is organizing the upcoming Craft International Animation Film Festival in Indonesia: “For us, it’s still impossible to gather 200 people in one room. So we could have the festival in 10 cities, each of one will have 20 people of audience, and we’ll reach more or less the same audience”. This idea of a festival dispersed in more than one location does not comply with the classic definition of festivals as something bounded in a specific location. However, in these unusual times, it could still be a smart way to gather physically while still dealing with the pandemic restrictions.

4.4.3. The New Normality

To conclude, hybrid formats appear as a realistic prevision of how things will evolve in the near future. While both festivals organizers and audiences are mostly hoping for a return to the physical, it is also true that people have started thinking differently about festivals and cultural events in general. From my interviews, it emerged the perception that, even when the pandemic

will be over, there will still be people expecting a digital dimension from any festival, and cultural organizations will have to adapt to it.

Thus, with its manifold possible combinations of physical and digital features, the hybrid format could likely prevail in festivals in the upcoming months. However, it should be remembered that the digital part of festivals will always incur the risk of resembling a streaming platform, that is not what festivals organizers nor most of the audiences wish. Thus, festivals organizers will have to be careful in always keeping some of these festivality aspects alive: for instance, through activities such as premiers, talks, Q&A, as VOID successfully did during its digital days.

In this way, according to my interviewees, they will likely meet their goals of delivering a compelling and unique experience to their audiences, even if different from the traditional ones that have characterized festivals up to last year. This shared perception about the upcoming future for film festivals was brilliantly summed up by Nacho: “Maybe it’s a very good moment to mix both: because now we have the mentality and the technology to do something digital, but at the same time we are people and now we understand that we need the physical part”.