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That kind of collaboration is sure to continue. Hernandez remained moved by it. “There was already a camaraderie that existed among this unique world of people who go to film festivals,” he said. “But as someone who’s been going for almost 30 years now, I never felt it as close to the heart as I did this past year.” Hernandez discussed ideas with Toronto’s co-heads, Cameron Bailey and Joana Vicente, whose festival also took a different turn last year. (Bailey and Vicente couldn’t speak by press time because of family vacations.)
The informal support group made bumps in the road less scary, but there were still surprises, some which haven’t fully played out. The Berlinale, celebrating its 71st edition, opted for a two-part structure, sharing its virtual screenings with the press and distributors in February, but saving potential in-person audience screenings for June. Carlo Chatrian, Berlin’s artistic director, is still waiting to understand how his program will play with a crowd. “On Twitter, the comments are always overwhelmingly positive, which is good,” he jokes. “But at the same time, you ask: What is the truth?”
A Sundance series of Los Angeles-based drive-in screenings had to be abandoned at the last minute (along with untold hours of spent labor), a casualty of the unpredictable coronavirus in transit. “That was a time when I could almost shake my fist at the gods,” Jackson said, fuming. And even when the drive-ins did happen, like New York’s sublime Queens evening with Wong Kar-wai’s “In the Mood for Love,” flat parking lots were unconducive to reading subtitles.
“It was a beautiful experience,” Hernandez confirmed. “That said, I had to move my car twice to reposition. There was a little slope, a hill, at the back. We started calling it the balcony. If you were parked up on that hill, you’d get an even better vantage point.”
Still, having survived their annus horribilis, the film festivals appear transformed for good. “Being in the Bronx and Queens and Brooklyn last year was the beginning of something, not an interim solution,” Hernandez said. “If the biggest outcome of 2020 was that, in 2021, we went back to the way things were, that would feel like a failure to me. Now we have a little more confidence because we’ve done it once. We have the battle scars, too.”
“Things evolve,” Pierson says. “Things don’t go back. Every year, we approach our work with: What makes sense now? What I personally liked best was that we were able to deliver on the South-by-Southwest-ness of it all. Somehow, we were able to deliver that on one screen, through one portal.”
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