Refreshments are available… in the kitchen.
The Brooklyn Film Festival is celebrating its 23rd anniversary with a free virtual theater experience that movie lovers can launch right from home — part of a two-month-long effort to bring the beloved event online during the coronavirus shutdowns.
“As soon as COVID-19 came to be, we decided it was not our style to cancel or postpone,” said Brooklyn Film Festival Executive Director Marco Ursino, one of the founding members of the organization. “That’s the mind of the independent artists at work. (We asked ourselves) ‘How can we resolve this?'”
Ursino and his team decided on developing the Theater Lobby — a website feature where movie buffs can select from a collection of more than 140 flicks from 40 different countries across several categories, including animation, documentary features and narrative shorts.
By Saturday, over 8,000 film buffs had already registered for the festival’s 23rd edition, Turning Point, which opened on Friday and will run through June 7.
“It was months of work and we pulled it off,” said Ursino, noting that festival organizers coordinated across time zones to hold virtual roundtable discussions about event planning. “It wasn’t easy, but we learned.”
“It’s all free of charge,” he added. “People right now are out of work. The minimum we can do is offer a good show for free.”
The collection boasts films like “Domino Effect” by Allessandro Rossetto, “Kingdom of Archers” by Robert Hixon and “Our Own” by Jeanne Leblanc. Winners in each category will be announced June 6, and the Audience Awards will be announced June 7.
“We’ve taken advantage of the web since the beginning … But in the future, (we) will probably have both a physical festival for locals and an online one for people in other parts of the world,” Ursino said.
“It’s a big responsibility to put something online like this,” he added. “We did our very best (and) I hope people enjoy it.”
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