Tribeca Enterprises and YouTube have jointly announced that a new digital-only festival is taking place next month. In just over a month, a new fest called We Are One: A Global Film Festival will happen exclusively on YouTube for 10 days, presenting narrative feature films, shorts, documentaries, and more – all free on YouTube for the world to watch.
Some of the planet’s biggest and most prestigious film festivals are teaming up to bring this event to life, including Cannes, NYFF, TIFF, Tribeca, Venice, and more.
Lincoln Center, the home of the New York Film Festival, unveiled the news about this “unprecedented” digital global film festival on their official website. The list of organizations involved in curating the content reads like a who’s who of terrific international festivals: the Annecy International Animation Film Festival, Berlin International Film Festival, BFI London Film Festival, Cannes Film Festival, Guadalajara International Film Festival, International Film Festival & Awards Macao (IFFAM), Jerusalem Film Festival, Mumbai Film Festival (MAMI), Karlovy Vary International Film Festival, Locarno Film Festival, Marrakech International Film Festival, New York Film Festival, San Sebastian International Film Festival, Sarajevo Film Festival, Sundance Film Festival, Sydney Film Festival, Tokyo International Film Festival, Toronto International Film Festival, Tribeca Film Festival, Venice Film Festival, and more are all part of the curation team.
The biggest question, though, is what specific programming will be included. There’s no official list yet, but the full schedule will be available closer to the festival start date. As we saw with the South By Southwest Film Festival’s attempts to temporarily transition to an online version this year, a digital film festival sounds good in theory but could actually end up hurting filmmakers and their chances for distribution. Will any major, recognizable movies be a part of this festival, or will this be entirely comprised of titles no one has ever heard of? I’m not suggesting that titles no one’s ever heard of aren’t worthy of being featured in an event like this, but it would certainly help if there were a flashy premiere or two lined up to drive more attention to this festival, and then hopefully some of that attention can spill over into the lesser-known projects.
As of this writing, several of the festivals involved in putting this together still intend to move forward with in-person versions of their own individual festivals later this year. Whether any of those actually end up happening, of course, remains to be seen. I have my doubts, but as we’ve seen recently, the entire world can change in the blink of an eye. Things could once again look very different in five or six months, and we’ll be documenting it all here as we get closer to what used to be the fall festival season and seeing how different organizations choose to handle this truly unconventional year.
We Are One: A Global Film Festival runs from May 29 – June 7, 2020 at YouTube.com/WeAreOne.
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