Rotterdam and Berlin film festival organisers on the pros and cons of online screenings and events as coronavirus pandemic upends their plans again

International film festivals in Rotterdam and Berlin are moving online partly or fully again, but organisers still see value in holding in-person events

A wider audience can be reached online, but ‘it’s the value of the informal encounter that’s something one cannot replicate,’ says one festival organiser

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The 71st Berlinale Summer Special was held as an outdoor-only event in June 2021. Many of the world’s major film festivals are pivoting to online screenings again for 2022 as Covid-19 cases rise. Photo: Getty Images

Published: 7:45pm, 27 Jan 2022

In an ideal world, Vanja Kaludjercic would be out and about on the streets of Rotterdam, in the Netherlands, introducing film directors and actors at sold-out screenings and catching up with producers and the press over coffee.

The artistic director of the International Film Festival Rotterdam would find a hectic schedule like that something of a relief after last year, when the festival had to be held online because of the coronavirus pandemic.

None of that, however, has come to pass.

Kaludjercic has instead spent the last few weeks poring over contingency plans at home, as ever-tightening measures to combat the Omicron variant of the coronavirus forced her and her team to pivot this year’s in-person festival online. Again.

Vanja Kaludjercic, artistic director of the International Film Festival Rotterdam, at the 77th Venice Film Festival in 2020. Photo: Getty Images

“It looked like we were on a very realistic path to have a physical edition, so we went with the programming of more than 300 titles,” says Kaludjercic. “It was only about eight weeks ago that it became clear that this may not be possible at all.”

And a turbulent eight weeks they were, too.