Jacqui Lofaro has long had a dream about how the Hamptons Doc Fest might look this year. The annual, all-documentary festival — which Lofaro founded in 2008 as the Hamptons Take 2 Documentary Film Festival — uses Bay Street Theater as its headquarters and is always held in early December, when the weather is crisp and the village aglow with twinkling white lights adorning the windmill on Long Wharf and the branches of live pine trees lining Main Street for the holiday season.
Now, with the brand new Sag Harbor Cinema totally rebuilt and ready to welcome audiences, Lofaro saw 2020 as the year that Sag Harbor would truly become a film festival village, with documentary lovers strolling Main Street as they went from one venue to the next to see movies.
“Our intentions were to take over Sag Harbor, like a mini-Sundance,” said Lofaro in a recent interview. “How perfect is that at holiday time? You go into the theater on a Saturday afternoon and come out at night and the trees are lit for the season.”
Of course, it was not to be since 2020 has turned out to be a year like no other.
“Maybe next year,” Lofaro said.
COVID-19 may have derailed the opportunity for Lofaro and her crew to use both Bay Street Theater and Sag Harbor Cinema for the 13th annual Hamptons Doc Fest, but that doesn’t mean the festival isn’t happening. Like many film festivals around the world, this year, the screenings will all be offered virtually.
“It was a big decision to do this festival online,” Lofaro concedes. “I see it as an opportunity and we have to embrace it. People are getting used to it and now they know they don’t have to go out in bad weather and can watch when they want — and the reach goes to more people.”
This year’s Hamptons Doc Fest, which has been expanded from five days to 10, runs Friday, December 4, to Sunday, December 13. The lineup includes 35 documentaries (including a shorts program of seven films) that can viewed at home over the course of the festival at the audience’s convenience.
Taking the festival online presented a huge learning curve for Lofaro and her team, who are working with the Canadian company CineSend to provide the platform for the films online. CineSend also coordinates with Elevent (goelevent.com) to provide the online ticketing platform to audiences.
Lofaro noted that several of the bigger films are geo-blocked — meaning they are restricted geographically by distributors so they can only be viewed by audiences in the United States, or the metro-New York region, for example.
“It’s a whole other language,” said Lofaro of the online model. “Whoever heard of geo-blocking? You’re dealing with totally different companies that deal with this online work. We send CineSend the films to be ingested. They put them into formatting for us.
“They can give us detailed analytics — when a film was watched and for how long, for example,” Lofaro added. “It’s helpful for understanding programming and subject matter.”
Fortunately, because the Hamptons Doc Fest isn’t until December, there has been ample opportunity to learn the virtual model from other festivals around the country.
“We’re a member of the Film Festival Alliance, a large organization of festivals, and they’ve done a lot of webinars,” Lofaro said. “Months ago, the Missoula film festival did a webinar — they were one of the first to go online.”
That festival — the International Wildlife Film Festival — was slated to run in-person in April, as it does every year. But Lofaro notes that just two weeks before opening, COVID-19 lockdown orders went into effect and the organizers scrambled to take everything online.
It’s a familiar tale for film festivals around the world. While the Sundance Festival ran as scheduled in Park City, Utah, in late January, it was one of the only festivals that was able to offer in-person screenings in 2020. Not long after, the 73rd annual Cannes Film Festival, which was scheduled to take place from May 12 to 23, was canceled altogether.
In the months since COVID-19 emerged, festivals have either had to cancel or adapt to the online model, and it appears that the cancellation of some of the bigger festivals has been a boon to smaller festivals like the Hamptons Doc Fest, in that more filmmakers are looking for places to screen their films.
“The number of submissions were higher this year, and I think it was because the earlier festivals shut down,” Lofaro said.
With that, this year’s festival will offer a wide range of documentaries on all sorts of subjects. Bio-docs are always a festival favorite, and this year, among the offerings are Gregory Monro’s “Kubrick by Kubrick” about the life of legendary filmmaker Stanley Kubrick, Sam Pollard’s “MLK/FBI” (the opening night film) which tells how J. Edgar Hoover worked to discredit Martin Luther King Jr. and “Unstoppable,” Nick Willing’s profile of artist Sean Scully.
Also offered will be Frederick Wiseman’s four-and-a-half-hour film “City Hall.” Festivalgoers will have a four-day window in which to watch the documentary about Boston city government under the leadership of Mayor Marty Walsh. The director is this year’s Pennebaker Career Achievement Award recipient in honor of the late filmmaker D.A. Pennebaker who lived in Sag Harbor and died in 2019. Before the screening, Lofaro will present the award online to Wiseman and a short career overview of his work will be offered by Josh Siegel, the curator of the department of film at MoMA.
Another highlight, “Some Kind of Heaven,” tells the story of retirees struggling to find their footing in The Villages retirement community in Florida. The film will be co-presented with the Sag Harbor Cinema, whose artistic director, Giulia D’Agnolo Vallan, will lead a Q&A with the film’s director, Lance Oppenheim.
“We have a couple foreign films. ‘Acasa, My Home’ is really a beautiful, powerful film,” Lofaro said. “It’s about a family in Romania who live in the wilderness. Then the government decides it will create a park and makes them move. It’s really lovely. The director, Radu Ciorniciuc, founded an independent media company and works on human rights. That’s one film that people might pass by, but shouldn’t.”
Films about music and dance are always well-represented at the Hamptons Doc Fest, and this year is no exception. Lofaro points to “Beethoven in Beijing” and “Behind the Strings” as two such documentaries
“They both relate to China and Mao, when there was no music and China shut off from the West and classical music,” Lofaro explained. “‘Beethoven in Beijing’ is about how in 1973 Nixon sent the Philadelphia Orchestra to open the Bamboo Curtain.
“‘Behind the Strings’ is about how the Shanghai Quartet played all over the world, but not in China, and follows their triumphant return,” she added. “‘Uprooted: The Journey of Jazz Dance’ is also very good — it’s an eye opener and an education.
“I’m aware of our audience, and if I like the films, I know audience will,” Lofaro said. “They run the gamut.”
Traditionally, the film introductions and Q&A’s with the directors that follow screenings are a big part of the Hamptons Doc Fest, so Lofaro explained how that aspect of the festival has been reimagined.
“Since we couldn’t bring filmmakers in, we had the directors do a 2-minute up-close piece, talking to audiences, giving an introduction to say why they made it,” Lofaro said. “Audiences like to have that connection to the filmmakers.”
While hopes are high that by next year, the pandemic will be behind us and we can, once again, gather in darkened theaters to watch documentaries with our fellow film-lovers, Lofaro finds that what she has learned this year is likely to remain part of the festival going forward.
“I think that virtual will be part of everybody’s business model going forward,” she said. “I think we will always offer some films virtually.”
To purchase Hamptons Doc Fest passes and tickets, visit hamptonsdocfest.com. Festival passes are $125 and individual film tickets are $12, available now. The website for this virtual film festival also includes a full description of each film in a downloadable program booklet, with instructions on how to watch films on a computer, tablet or television.
Annette Hinkle on Nov 23, 2020