Portable Film Festival launches at Bebida
On Sunday afternoon I walked around to Bebida on Smith St to attend the launch of the 2008 Portable Film Festival. Now in its third year, the festival has expanded its categories and is attracting more and more entries. Founders Andrew Apostola and Simon Goodrich have expanded the Portable team to include Al Cossar and Kate Elton, who now run the festival while they focus on many of their other activities and events. It was good to be able to talk to all of them at the launch.
The Portable Film Festival is moving towards an ongoing model where instead of chronologically discrete events the community is sustained by events throughout the year. The platform Portable have built for the festival is unique and has many features that MIFF and other established festivals should adopt.
At very least I want to be able to vote online at MIFF, rather than filling out endless forms. MIFF could build an online community where its hugely loyal customers could write reviews of films, vote on films, vote on the best reviews of films they write and see who else likes the films they like. Building a cohesive online community out of a fragmented and disorganised real life community would be of enormous benefit to MIFF in maintainging relationships with its customers and empowering them to entertain each other throughout the year.
It was a fun afternoon with free beers and fantastic nibbles. The general talk was of having lots of time to watch the films online as we all agreed that the Olympics are rubbish and there will be nothing on TV to watch for the next few weeks. I’m going to curled up in my beanbag with my MacBook Pro watching films.
Posts you may find relevant and interesting
- Portable Film Festival is live, 14 September 2006
- The Portable Film Festival, 8 September 2006
- the possibility of a good Houellebecq film, 23 April 2008
- mass psychosis, 23 September 2006
- Italian film festival, 31 October 2006