This time last year, Tabitha Jackson was preparing to helm her first Sundance Film Festival—she was also preparing to helm the first Sundance to be held amid a global pandemic. Because of COVID-19, the 2021 fest was held completely online, with each movie, as well as filmmaker Q&As and panels, streamed online. At the time, Jackson told me, it was an experiment, not so much a blueprint for the festival, but “an opportunity to gather evidence for what we might wish to see.” Earlier this month, she put those lessons to use. Amid plans for a virtual-live hybrid festival for 2022, Omicron cases spiked. Sundance would be going all-virtual once again.
This time, though, Jackson and her colleagues were prepared. Since they’d held the festival online last year, they knew what to do. And in planning this year’s festival as a hybrid event, they found most of the mechanisms for pivoting to streaming were already in place. When the event launched last night, it was practically seamless. For the next week, films will stream online, Q&As will take place via Zoom, and attendees looking for the social aspects of the fest will be able to hang out in The Spaceship, a virtual—it’s tempting to call it “metaverse-ian”, but no—hub for post-screening conversations. (Yes, you can go in VR.) “The saving grace was the online platforms”, Jackson says of the festival’s late-in-the-game planning pivot. “A massive silver lining is that we could have a festival we are still excited about.”
…But even if COVID is, one day, a thing of the past, another virus could take its place. And film festivals have always struggled with accessibility issues that can be mitigated by allowing people to attend from home. So perhaps hybrid festivals are the future even in the best of times. Cinema culture exists on multiple planes; it’s time film festivals did too.