The ________ Necessities, directed by Benjamin Font Quarantine International Film Festival
As the film community across the globe sits in limbo during amid the COVID-19 outbreak; two Canadian filmmakers have made the best of a bad situation by launching a virtual film festival. Calgary-based filmmakers Siobhan Cooney and Spencer Streichert started the Quarantine International Film Festival (QIFF) as the outbreak stalled their own film projects, and it’s turning out to be a hit.
For Streichert the inspiration was personal. “On March 13 I was shooting the pilot for a web series,” he tells Observer. “At the end of the day we ended up getting shut down because of COVID. Then on my home my agent messaged me and said this other project I was on was getting shut down.” As Observer has reported in the wake of coronavirus-related cancellations and delays, he was far from alone. “Siobhan and I knew that a lot of people in the film community were going to be impacted by this and we needed a distraction,” he says.
SEE ALSO: Patton Oswalt Revisits His Epic ‘Parks & Rec’ Rant 7 Years Later
“We are filmmakers, actors and artists ourselves so we know how hard our community was hit by this we wanted to give people something positive to focus on,” Cooney tells Observer. They also didn’t want all of the submissions to the festival to be about the pandemic. Instead: “We wanted to give creators something positive to work on and think about during self-isolation.” The festival’s theme is “bear or bare”—either focusing on the animal or using the bare minimum. They left the requirements pretty open-ended from there.
“I figured this would be a low key thing. I decided to submit and I’ve been blown away by the response that they’ve gotten,” says Sydney Herauf, a Toronto-based filmmaker, whose short film Quarantine Valentine premiered at the festival. QIFF received hundreds of submissions across more than 50 countries, although most of the films came from the United States, Canada and the U.K. “I think it’s amazing that they gave an opportunity for creators to come together,” Herauf adds.
Herauf’s film is about self-love despite extreme circumstances. “It’s about finding things to like about yourself when you are spending all this time alone,” Herauf says, and the film is constructed from a collection of over 40 homemade videos from performers across Canada.
“One of the reasons I was attracted to the festival was because it provides this community support especially in such a rough moment,” says Los Angeles based filmmaker Benjamin Font, whose film The ________ Necessities premiered at the festival. “It was a fun way to stay creative, work those muscles and challenge yourself” while other projects had stalled, he says.
His submission is built around the phenomenon of deja vu. “I’ve had an issue with deja vu for the last nine months but especially during this quarantine where everyday can feel the same. You are just repeating yourself,” Font says.
On Sunday, QIFF announced their top 40 submissions as well as award nominees. QIFF will soon narrow the field. They will announce their top 25 submissions at the end of the week. The top 40 films are now available to view on Quarantine Film Festival’s Youtube.
