Film Festivals of 2016

Just how many film festivals grace the Bay Area over a year?

At the beginning of 2016, I decided to find out. Every time a new festival opened in the Bay Area, I added it to a list. And now that it’s clear that we’re not going to see any other film festivals this year, I have the number: 57.

That’s a little more than an average of one festival a week. Of course, some weeks had no festivals. But some had as many as six.

But how do you define a film festival? The word Festival in the title doesn’t quite do it. Over May and June, the Pacific Film Archive ran a series called the UCLA Festival of Preservation 2016 that screened ten features over the course of seven weeks. That’s just a series (although a good one).

On the other hand, the (Not Just) Hong Kong Action Film Series didn’t call itself a festival, and ran mostly just on weekends. But each weekend provided almost as many movies as the PFA’s UCLA “Festival.” So this “Series” is really a festival in my book.

That became my primary criteria for a film festival: It had to offer a lot of cinema over a short time. Five features a month didn’t qualify. 15 over a week – or seven over a weekend – did.

That’s not entirely objective, of course. There may have been series that I should have called festivals and festivals that I should have called series.

I had one other criteria: A festival had to have a website, or at least a webpage. I had to link to something.

Here are the 57 film festivals I listed. I don’t know if all the links are still good.

S	M	T	W	T	F	S
				1	2	3
4	5	6	7	8	9	10
11	12	13	14	15	16	17
18	19	20	21	22	23	24
25	26	27	28	29	30	31

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Published by Lincoln Spector