The Future of the Hybrid Film Festival

How should film festivals connect artists, their projects, and audiences in virtual and hybrid spaces? Why does it matter?

“As festival organizers, we not only curate projects, we curate community,” explained Eddie Lou, Sandbox Festival founder and organizer.

While many festivals are back in person, it wasn’t long ago that festival organizers were forced to create fully online or hybrid (a mix of in-person and online audiences) community gatherings due to the pandemic and subsequent lockdowns. With COVID came an upending of the time honored process of gathering people in a specific place at a specific time to see new work together, discuss it and connect with the artists and each other. The systems and spaces for creating community of the past would no longer work.

Forced to pivot online with often only a few weeks to prepare, many festivals had to be canceled. Those few events that could focused their efforts on making the work accessible to people in their homes. In the frenzy, festival curators were in many ways too focused on addressing technical challenges and navigating clunky platforms to put intentional thought into facilitating community.

But community is where ideas are sparked, relationships born or deepened and collaborations emerge. The magic of a festival is as much the community gathering as it is the projects.

Given the importance of bringing people together, immersive media programmers more fluent in virtual tools and the work of producing online experiences took on the challenge of fostering community in a virtual space. New or unfamiliar online platforms and experiences meant to connect people premiered alongside the projects.

From a positive standpoint, it allowed for much more access and inclusivity. Barriers such as cost, travel and time away from work were eliminated. But it was hard. Between technological hurdles, lack of experience in facilitating online or hybrid festival communities and the sheer amount of work and resources required, the online experience was ultimately incomparable to past experiences of being there in-person. While many will agree that being together IRL will always be better, it also breeds a certain type of exclusivity and lost opportunity to create more inclusive and meaningful opportunities for connection. For some festivals, exclusivity is an important right for an artist, and festivals have and will return to an in person audience and mission only. But others, like IDFA DocLab, Sundance New Frontier and Venice Immersive each have masterfully created online experiences that displayed the whimsy, excitement, and “magic” of the festival — without reducing the virtual/hybrid experience to a cheapened version of being there in-person.

Furthermore, the world has changed. Hybridity is here to stay and we’ve gotten a glimpse of what is possible for online audiences as artists and organizers continue to experiment.

Within this context, earlier this year as part of MIT OpenDocLab’s IDFA Network research collaboration, which uses the IDFA Festival as a living lab for research, Ambar Reyes-Lopez and I began research on IDFA DocLab’s 2021 hybrid Festival. We began our research looking at IDFA DocLab, later broadening our research to include interviews with other event curators.

We asked: How do film festivals connect filmmakers and artists, their projects and audiences in a virtual space and in hybrid spaces? And why does it matter?

Key Findings: Reimagined encounters

The full research report is still in development, but in the meantime, we thought we would share key themes that arose, many of which centered the wide-ranging definitions of what constitutes a hybrid film festival.

There are different types of hybridity.

In our discussion, IFDA DocLab Curator Caspar Sonnen immediately complicated our definition of hybrid film festival to include much more than audience presence. As a curator, he thinks about the artists, the projects, the venue, the events and the audiences — and the many virtual and physical permutations of each.

Says Sonnen: “I think it’s so key when we talk about whatever terms we use to always differentiate. Is it the artist? Is it the audience? Is it the event? Is it the venue? Who is in VR? Who is online? Who is physically there? On all those levels you have to answer that question all the time.”

2. Hybridity can adapt the digital to physical spaces, not only the physical to digital.

“We literally started DocLab thinking about this, but then in the opposite direction,” Sonnen explains. “We started with the idea of making a program that celebrated these digital intangible, ephemeral, undefined, interactive, narrative, weird experiences. The festival was going to be our physical playground to explore how to answer the question: How do you physically collectively celebrate digital works?”

3. Hybridity can be a connection between platforms.

Ziv Schneider, creative technologist says,“I imagine this idea of platform hopping, like actually imagine rafts in the river and you’re like hopping from one to another and I want to be able to scream. I want to be able to yell to the other ramp.”

Ziv imagines an ideal where people in a room physically could interact with people in VR headsets, on computers or any other technological medium, and it would all be one shared space. Interoperability — in this case, seamless connection between different online platforms — is a key piece of the hybrid experience in more ways than we might expect.

4. Hybridity need not be limited to the temporal and spatial.

Rick Treweek is the founder of MetaCrew, a community of artists, designers and technologists who meet regularly in VRChat. “I really believe there is space for post-festivals to happen in the metaverse. Because the biggest thing about festivals for me is, I have the best time, I drink, I party, I have the best discussions. And then suddenly I’m at home in South Africa, I’m like, ‘Who is that person? How do I get in touch?’ Very quickly, you actually lose that whole momentum of that experience you had. I’d love to see in the future that the festival ends on a Sunday, but for two weeks, there’s a space where everyone knows they can still go, they can meet up, they can hang out.”

5. “Hybridity” isn’t the best term.

“I honestly dislike the term ‘hybrid’ because it assumes that it’s two different things,” says Shari Frilot, Sundance Festival Programmer and Curator of Sundance New Frontier. The reality is that we are living on a continuum with virtual and digital elements connected to us all the time. So to call it hybrid and to aspire to a hybrid, that nomenclature really boxes it in as two elements that are separate and distinct from one another when I don’t think that they are.”

An added burden

Given the multiplicity of definitions, it’s not surprising that many interviewees pointed out that curating hybrid festivals is hard. As Venice VR Curator Liz Rosenthal said, “It’s two entirely different festivals and you need huge teams for both.”

Will festival organizers have budgets and time to continue hybrid festivals as we return to physical ones? And why should they? Curating in-person festivals is already a lot of work. Hybrid film festivals can offer opportunities for access and scale that in-person never will — but the intent to create more access can easily end up creating two tiers of audiences where those who do not have the means to be in-person end up with a second-class festival experience.

But if done right, there is a lot to gain. Wars and pandemics change societies. During the flu pandemic of 1919 and World War I, independent nickelodeon theaters closed down and the monopolistic Hollywood era of studio conglomerates took over. Today we are contending with big tech conglomerates of streaming platforms homogenizing and limiting our experiences. Festivals offer opportunities and models for humans to uphold cherished work (in community) that delight, surprise (or challenge) and change us. What that community looks like is up to us.

Our forthcoming report due out in the fall will explore how festival organizers, artists and technologists are creating meaningful experiences and connections in virtual and hybrid spaces and lessons learned as they boldly and creatively imagine film festivals of the future.

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