I had the pleasure of interviewing with Kinoscope critic Steven Erickson this past week in preparation for the upcoming festival. We talk about the challenges of this kind of undertaking, the differences between physical and digital film festivals, and thoroughly tease at parts of our official selection!
The official program will be released tomorrow — be sure to follow our social media pages to keep in the loop!
Interview can be found on the Kinoscope publication here.
Submissions are now closed; the program is nearly ready. Our team has spent the past month mulling over 600+ submissions from over fifty countries and compiled our favorites into four days of programming.
Each program runs 70-85 minutes long and features narrative and experimental films of all genres, including personal essays, music and dance videos, films recorded entirely on laptop screens, phones, or, inversely, by analog means, and more…
With submission deadlines now over — and with less than a month to go before we can finally showcase the amazing talent on our programs — we at the Long Distance Film Festival are incredibly excited to announce our inaugural jury! These revered members of the film community, with their varied tastes and experiences in the industry, will be judging our official selection by deciding on our grand prize recipients. We are extremely honored to have their support! Without further ado, our jury is as follows:
The LDFF is honored to have been recognized by The Beat as one of the “7 Best Digital and Online Film Challenges” for this moment in lock-down. We are grateful for their write-up, which highlights one of the most fundamental aspects of our festival: “One of the most open-ended iterations on our list, the Long Distance Film Festival is truly an online-based festival that intends to live entirely online via a global live-streaming marathon of selected projects. While acknowledging these trying times, the festival encourages submissions of all types…”
To read more about us, along with other efforts that remind us of the power of film as a universal and vital art form, check out the rest of the list on The Beat here.
In an effort to curtail counter-programming with the recently announced We Are One online festival, Long Distance Film Festival will be postponing its screening date from June 5-7 to the weekend of June 19-21. To account for this extended timeframe, the Late Deadline and final Notification Date will be extended to May 25th and 28th, respectively. We will continue to watch and enjoy your submissions as they come in, and are very excited about how the final programs are coming together. Finally, we at the festival would like to apologize for any possible inconvenience that may have arisen from these scheduling changes, but hope that you will still be able to clear your calendars and attend nonetheless.
Long Distance Film Festival would like to thank the curated streaming service MUBI for contributing six annual memberships to our prize pool. These memberships will be awarded to our jury and audience award winners, and will allow them a year’s free access to Mubi’s ever-changing collection of hand-picked films, from new directors and award-winners alike. Whereas other streaming services are sometimes cluttered and overwhelming, MUBI instead features a rotation of thirty quality films, with a new one released every single day. The platform is available in 190 countries, with the films picked oftentimes guided by local cultures and cinema. MUBI is also one of the world’s largest communities for film-lovers, with over 9 million members around the globe streaming and downloading movies anytime, on any screen or device, anywhere.
For more information about the service, visit MUBI’s website or check out its prestigious daily international film publication, Notebook.
