NECSUS – Autumn 2020 #Method: Come Together? Curating communal viewing experiences for hybrid and online film festivals

By Dagmar Brunow. Published December 6, 2020

Short cut from the text. Read the whole article here.

“Are online festival editions completely unable to reproduce the community feel that analog festivals can create? This article sets out to challenge the simple binary of the analog versus the digital. Online viewing tends to be framed as an individual, solitary activity in contrast to the collective experience of watching a film offline in the cinema. Questioning the binary opposition often constructed between online and offline viewing, this article presents two best practice examples illustrating how a sense of community can be achieved while streaming films online. These two examples of communal viewing experiences in online formats, which I have been following during lockdown, are Carol Morley’s Friday Film Club and the event ‘Come Together’, arranged by the Swedish Archive for Queer Moving Images. Despite not being part of the film festival circuit, these cases provide best practice examples for film festival programming.”