Back in March when COVID-19 brought our festival preparations to a halt less than a week before our opening night, we announced that GSFF 2020 would be postponed until August. Whilst we are dying to share our programme with you, it is very clear to us that a live event in August will not be possible in the way that we would wish to deliver it.
The 13th edition of Glasgow Short Film Festival will therefore take place entirely online.
As one of our international filmmakers wrote to us, film festivals are “the ultimate pockets of resistance for films to be seen in a movie theatre”, and we have no intention of giving up on our main purpose of providing shared experiences of watching cinema. But nor do we want to take risks with our audience’s safety, or reduce capacity in a social distancing exercise that detracts from communal viewing.
The online festival will run from 17-23 August, and will be accessible to audiences across the UK, as well as international industry delegates. The full programme will be announced 28 July, and will feature our competitions and many of our special programmes, alongside some brand new specially curated programmes, filmmaker interviews and live Q&As. Some elements of the original programme will be deferred to the 2021 edition of the festival.
We are thrilled to announce a unique collaboration with our good friends at Short Waves Festival in Poznań, Poland. Like us, Short Waves was forced to cancel at very short notice in March, and their rescheduled festival (18-23 August) will be a hybrid of online and offline activities. In this challenging time, international collaboration between festivals is needed more than ever, and we look forward to announcing some shared industry events and public programming.
Meanwhile, we have now opened our call for entries for the 14th edition of GSFF, which will take place 24-28 March 2021, back in all our favourite big screen venues – we hope. In response to the current crisis, we will accept works completed up to two years before the 2021 festival, increasing our usual window by 6 months. We have also lowered the cost of submission fees and adjusted our rules and regulations to reflect the uncertainties brought about by the pandemic.