by James Fletcher
Usually scheduled to commence in June, this year the twelve-day festival was set to see a return to in-cinema screenings across a number of Sydney locations, including the festival’s home, The State Theatre from August 18. However, with the NSW Government recently announcing an extended lockdown across the city until, at least, late August, the decision to move the festival to November has been made in order to protect public safety and maintain the festival’s goal of bringing film lovers and filmmakers together, in person for a celebration of local and international cinema.
“Primarily, the conversation has been with filmmakers, because once you have a full program you want to hold it together,” explains SFF CEO Leigh Small. “We then talked with our Federal, State and Local Government partners who fully support us in our commitment to hold an in-cinema festival, and of course we spoke with the venues.
“So, it’s been a very collaborative decision, with one ambition in mind, which is to present an in-cinema festival.”
With a three-month grace period, hopefully allowing for the latest chaos of the pandemic to settle, the festival is maintaining a positive outlook that the current program shouldn’t see much disruption, as Small elaborates.
“All of our current films, we hope to maintain in the November program; of course, some will slide away if lockdown finishes early, as they would have already had their own theatrical release prior to November, so we may lose some titles, but not many.
“But the delay also allows us the opportunity to program out of Venice, and Cannes and even Toronto for titles that would normally have had a theatrical release before June next year.
“So, there are some opportunities and some losses, but the primary ambition is to keep the program as it currently stands.”
While Sydney Film Festival remains one of the city’s most anticipated cultural events, public safety in such uncertain times remains the festival’s primary concern.
“We expect there will be some Covid-safe restrictions in place because the percentage of vaccinations won’t be high enough,” says Small. “We are certainly optimistic about June 2022, because our audience would be double-vaccinated by then and hopefully the world would have returned to some normality. But for our November festival this year, we are anticipating there will be Covid restrictions in place, but that we will see an enthusiastic audience returning to cinemas.
“An interesting fact that I recently saw published,” continues Small, who has maintained her title as Festival CEO since 2010, “was that The Berlin Institute of Technology did research and discovered that cinemas are safer than almost any other environment if they follow safety restriction. So, in fact, a cinema is a safe place to be.”
