In the wake of a spate of short film festival cancellations due to the coronavirus pandemic, several programmers have joined hands to launch a fundraising festival.
“My Darling Quarantine,” an online short film festival set up by programmers from the Tallin Black Nights festival, Cannes, Venice, Berlin and Locarno, went live on the Talking Shorts platform on March 16 and will continue until the current global crisis is resolved.
Every week, seven short films focusing on dystopian themes will bow on the platform, and the audience will vote for best film. Half of the donations collected by the festival will go to medical humanitarian organization Medecins Sans Frontieres and the remaining to cultural institutions and workers financially affected by the virus.
Films to be shown during the first week of the festival include Konstantinos Antonopoulos’ “Postcards From The End of the World,” a film where a Greek family has to find a way to get off a secluded island in the Mediterranean when confronted with the unexpected end of the world. The film has had a robust festival run, playing at Sarajevo, Tampere and Winterthur, where it won the audience award in 2019. The “My Darling Quarantine” festival marks its online debut.
The festival is the brainchild of Enrico Vannucci, short film advisor for the Venice Film Festival and programmer for Torino Short Film Market, who is currently quarantined in Italy.
Vannucci said: “Watching all of this situation unfold while sitting in my forced confinement at home, I came up with the idea to create an online short film festival about what is happening now, in order to fundraise money to help the healthcare system stakeholders dealing with the current problem.”
Canceled short film festivals include Go Short – International Short Film Festival Nijmegen, the Glasgow Short Film Festival, Short Waves Festival in Poland and Canada’s Festival Regard.