Colorado is dwelling to no less than 40 movie festivals starting from the glitzy to the gory. This Friday, the Denver Movie Competition opens its forty sixth 12 months with a choice of over 100 function movies and 74 quick movies. Regardless of chopping this system from final 12 months’s 143 feature-length movies, the competition nonetheless has one of many deepest catalogs within the state.
Matthew Campbell, creative director for Denver Movie Competition, stated this system lower was partly as a response to the slimmer audiences brought on by the pandemic. “In fact, (we) are dismayed when (we’ve) programmed a movie and there’s nobody within the viewers,” Campbell stated. “What we’ve tried is to make it a bit of extra streamlined, a bit of extra digestible, and tightening our focus in order that the movies we do have within the competition have a bigger viewers.”
Shining a light-weight
Most movie festivals match into one in all three classes: regional, {industry} and area of interest.
Denver Movie Competition is a regional competition, a class that additionally contains Breckenridge Movie Competition and Crested Butte Movie Competition. These festivals give attention to movies their native audiences wouldn’t have entry to in any other case — whether or not it’s an awards front-runner that hasn’t been broadly launched, or impartial and worldwide movies that may not make it into mainstream theaters.
The variety of movie show field workplace tickets bought has been trending downward for the previous 20 years. In 2002, the variety of film tickets bought within the U.S. and Canada was round 1.5 billion. By 2019, that quantity was near 1.2 billion, a lower of about 346 million moviegoers.
Even with field workplace smashes this 12 months corresponding to “Barbie” and “Oppenheimer,” the variety of tickets bought at theaters is drastically down from pre-pandemic ranges. After bottoming out at 199 million in 2020, the variety of tickets bought final 12 months was as much as 703 million. The change in theater demand makes movie competition showings much more important for viewers who worth seeing a movie on an enormous display screen.
“Movie festivals have all the time had that objective, however now it’s much more vital to shine a light-weight on movies that aren’t simply out there,” Campbell stated. “And it may be their solely probability to see a few of these movies in a theater.”
The opposite main kind of movie competition is what Campbell referred to as the “{industry} competition,” or the “market.” These are the festivals that populate most imaginations: Sundance, Cannes, Toronto and Telluride. Attendees — apart from the occasional hardcore cinephile — are sometimes {industry} or industry-adjacent of us who maintain awards-giving or buying energy. It’s the place to be seen, the place movies debut, critics write their first evaluations and distribution corporations make (or don’t make) their provides.
The third kind is the area of interest or subject-specific competition. These sometimes middle a tradition or style, just like the 5Point Movie Competition in Carbondale, which focuses on journey movies, Aspen Shortsfest or Telluride Horror Present.
What to look at
With 109 feature-length movies, near 180 whole movies on this system, it might be exhausting to universally suggest a given movie, or perhaps a given movie observe on the Denver Movie Competition. That’s by design.
“There are themes you may draw from, however a part of programming is discovering that stability, and sort of deliberately combating in opposition to having too many movies that simply converse to 1 one other,” Campbell stated. This system is deliberately broad as a way to keep away from an insular competition expertise.
That stated, a few of the designated tracks this 12 months embrace a Colorado Highlight, an Italian showcase and a group of movies from the UK and Eire. The competition additionally has a lot of standing tracks that includes movies which have been proven all through Denver Movie’s year-round programming, pulling from CineLatinx; CinemaQ, which focuses on LGBTQ filmmaking; and its Ladies + Movie program.
All through preliminary screenings, Campbell noticed a lot of Ukrainian movies he needed to incorporate, each documentaries that highlight the Russian invasion and narrative items that don’t.
Campbell calls it the competition’s “unofficial” observe. “It’s extra of a well-rounded expertise, the place (we’re) not simply pigeonholing them into storytelling in regards to the Russian invasion — these movies might be considered collectively, or they’ll stand on their very own two ft,” Campbell stated.
What, the place, when, how a lot?
The Denver Movie Competition runs Nov. 3-12, with 109 feature-length movies and 74 quick movies scheduled for the Sie FilmCenter, AMC 9 + CO 10 theater, Ellie Caulkins Opera Home, MCA Denver on the Vacation Theater, the Denver Botanic Gardens, and Denver Museum of Nature & Science.
Tickets can be found on-line and on the Sie FilmCenter. Particular person showings are $17 ($13 for Denver Movie members) and particular displays, a choice of function movies, are $30 ($25 for Denver Movie members). Details about packages and tickets to particular occasions might be discovered at this hyperlink.
