The Past: Physical Festivals

It is now helpful to take a step back to what was the normality before the pandemic: film festivals have, by definition, always been physical events. What emerged from my data is that certain elements are so essential that they cannot be left out from the digital formats, and the concept of “experience” sums them up. Thus, after briefly outlining what these vital elements are, this section investigates the possibility of recreating the experience of physical festivals.

These considerations are again based on the case of VOID 2021, but they also involve potential ways of recreating the festivality which are inspired by other contexts.

4.3.1. What are We Missing from Physical Festivals?

After more than one year of pandemic, it is unquestionable that most people are hungry for physical events. The impossibility of experiencing the cultural product with people other than one’s household is among the primary limits of digital festivals. Thus, the missing or minimal social interaction is a central element to consider. The interaction with other people is vital, also for the perception of the movie itself, as Nacho explains: “In physical film festivals, how people watch the movie and how people are in the same place, how they talk, how they react, affects a lot how you perceive the movie”.

This consideration leads to a second element that people are certainly missing besides the physical interaction: the physical location. The interviewees agreed that digital screenings could be enjoyable, but not comparable to being in the same room and watching the same movie. The cinema venue shapes the overall experience through a series of elements that impact the individual's cultural consumption, creating a “viewing frame” that is clearly different from the digital, individual one. The third crucial element of traditional film festivals is the inspirational influence that they can have. As described by Daniella: “The most important thing that festivals have is that they connect with the audience. (...) They have this amazing power of being able to communicate with people truly, honestly: people trust festivals, people follow festivals.”

Thus, it appears as what makes film festivals extraordinary is their overall experience, which goes far beyond the film itself. A part of this experience undoubtedly got lost when the pandemic happened and festivals worldwide had to turn digital, and this aspect is still the focus of debates on the subject. The interviewees mostly agreed that the festival experience has to be physical, but this does not mean that it is not worth trying to create a unique cultural offer.

Chonie brilliantly summed up this concept: “The challenge here is not to mimicking the experience of the real event, but to take the value of the experience and then translate it to another format.”

This consideration relates to one of the main risks of organizing a digital festival: ending up being very similar to a streaming platform. This can happen, first of all, because most audiences are not trained enough yet for these new formats of festivals, which are something entirely new for them as well. Hence, when festival organizers announce their movies are available online, as VOID did when announcing its digital edition, people would know what that mean; however, they do not relate it to a festival. Thus, the challenge for digital festivals is indeed to differentiate themselves from streaming platforms, through distinguishing elements meant to “festivalize”

their screenings. How audiences react to these elements depends once again on their training and their inclination to change. There will be people appreciating the effort and taking part in it, but there will also be those who only want to enjoy the film and decide to use the digital platform simply as they would with Netflix.

4.3.2. How to Recreate the Experience

With the goal of delivering a compelling experience, VOID developed several strategies to differentiate itself from a mere streaming platform when turning digital. First of all, some titles were made available for a limited number of days, or even for only 24 hours. The idea behind it was to recreate the feeling that if the audience wanted to watch a particular title, they had to do it at a specific time. As summarized by Claudia: “Festivals are defined as events that take place at a certain time and in a certain place: what we did was to create this sense of exclusivity and urgency artificially”.

Thus, the organizers wanted to avoid the festival staying the same for the whole month. With these activities, they attempted to keep a sort of “momentum”, so that as soon as the audiences had the feeling that the festival was slowing down, there would be another time-framed special event. Besides these titles, VOID also organized an opening and closure ceremony on the first and last day of the digital festival. At a defined time, the team published a video on YouTube featuring the organizers, together with some creators and partners. The third initiative consisted of the awards’ ceremonies. VOID created a video of the jury members declaring the two winners of the “Graduation Film Award” and “Lejf Marcussen Award”, with the winners receiving a digital award, an idea inspired by Cannes. The third prize was the “Audience Award”: this was a brilliant idea in making the audience part of the festival because the prize went to the film they voted for the most. The last activity in this regard was creating some free contents that were shared online on VOID Social Media. An example was the “Danish Spotlight”

session, whose focus was highlighting animation produced in Denmark: this activity was ideated to give the audiences a glimpse into the creators’ world and bridge the gap between these two categories.

Besides arranging these practical activities related to the actual content of the festival, the organizers also tried to make the audience recreate, at least in some part, the festival experience at their own places. The main action in this sense was to develop a little “festival package”

consisting of elements that people could take from the digital to the analogic world. For instance, the package contained a little wristband and tickets the attendees could print and give to a friend as an invite to come over for the “home festival”. It also included a brief explanation of how to set a cozy and festival-ish atmosphere at one’s home, an idea inspired by the above-mentioned Stella Polaris Festival. This festival package was conceived so that the audiences could try to reproduce a minimum physical festival in their homes. As discussed in the previous sub-chapter, mimicking an authentic festival experience is complicated, if not impossible.

However, VOID’s team made all the efforts necessary to make sure the audiences enjoyed a different but still unique experience. As described by Claudia: “We used all the possible touchpoints to establish a stronger relationship with the audiences. So that, although we couldn’t meet in the cinema, you could still take a little piece of VOID at home: you don’t come to VOID, but it is VOID that comes to you”.

These initiatives were followed by an intensification of the experience’s sharing on Social Media, initiated by VOID and successfully followed by VOID’s audiences. In fact, the audiences often reacted and shared their experience on Social Media of what they conceived to festivalize their houses. This aspect was gratifying, because festivals indeed are about sharing the moment. To conclude, the digital experience was also enhanced by what Anne defined as

“festival behaviour”. The strength of the platform’s offer was that all the titles were available to the audience; the alternative would have been to make the audience pay for single tickets. The choice of the festival pass, also dictated by budgeting reasons, was successful in promoting this behaviour for people to watch more titles than they otherwise would have done. As Anne summed up: “It was also dictated by the fact that it promotes festival behaviour (...). Typically, what you do during a festival is that you watch a couple of films because you really want, and then maybe you watch some more just because they are going on right now”.

Overall, the team was delighted with what they did to recreate the experience, considering the workforce available. Of course, since the phenomenon of digital festivals has just begun, there is always room for new ideas. Talking with the stakeholders of VOID, an idea in particular emerged more than once, talking about how to recreate the festivality. With his experience as an audio-visual artist, Nacho suggested to shape film festivals as video games: virtual places where professionals and audiences have their “avatar” and can meet or go to online events together. This idea, which could help making digital festivals more interactive, could be done via 3D technology. However, the barriers in doing so are manifold: organizers would need to spend plenty of money and energy on this feature, and the participants should be equipped with an adequate technological device. Daniella experienced first-hand this innovative feature at Brussels International Fantastic Film Festival: “I was in a festival in Brussels, and they had an app called Gather where you could enter and navigate the space, connecting with other people.

You had your avatar and then you got to know other people, moving up and down in the space”.

In this way, she could approach other field professionals; when the interaction happened, the system would open a chat screen for the two people for connecting and networking. This case, although complex and high-priced, is just one of many examples showing how the road for recreating the experience, or at least saving a part of the social interaction, is still in its first stages of action.