Changing a cinema festival into an online festival

For the zeitimpuls shortfilm festival 2020 the shutdown of Austrian cultural life nearly could have taken a bad end. Small festivals like zeitimpuls have to operate in very limited financial and temporal frames, often relying on only one particular cinema and limited dates that won’t collide with bigger events or other festivals.

Seen in this light we at at zeitimpuls shortfilm consider ourselves quite lucky and priviledged since our completely changed concept and relocation to the online sphere was openly accepted by our providers of funding. Without this support it would have meant an uncertain future for us. Now, with this new possibility we strive to make the very best out of our five days online festival (22 – 27 June) and the fact that we’ll be able to screen more than 130 selected films worldwide. With the arrangement of a new film category, “Inspired by Quarantine”, we believe that we both could encourage filmmakers who tried to come to terms with Covid-19 and lockdown, but also added a surplus for our audience.
At the same time we’re aware of some substantial lacks of an online presence: the social experience of a festival, the common experience inside of a cinema hall isn’t simply convertible into the digital realm. It is a real challenge to nontheless make beneficial social interactions possible online and we won’t solve such a general problem in five festival days. By implementing a moderated chatroom in our festival app we’ll hope to provide a reasonable compromise for our audience. With an audience voting there is an interesting interactive way to be involved.  The voting will decide about the award winners in the categories “Best Spot”, “Open Category”, “School Film”, “Junior Category”, the newly introduced “Inspired by Quarantine” and from the spots from the Viennese “Together” school workshops.