Dear Film Festival Fan,
We moved into our seventh year with an abundance of optimism for being able to make great advances with our mission of building film culture in SWO. We labeled 2022 the “comeback year”, which we thought of as the year that our audience would come back to enjoying film festival films in the way they should enjoy them: in a theater surrounded by their community and the creative minds of filmmakers. A wonderful shared experience that provokes deep thoughts and lively discussions.
We boldly stepped up to this and hired a talented programmer to gather together 15 of the best films from major film festivals around the world. We brought the opportunity for regional audiences to see some of the biggest titles to run the festival circuit in 2022.
This was a gamble. The costs on this program were high, but we were sure that our gamble would pay off with our community coming out in droves to see these fabulous and rare films.
Then COVID continued to rear its ugly head. That nasty beast that we hoped would be an afterthought by now is still having an impact. Our audience didn’t show up as we had hoped.
It was a great festival, and we had amazing feedback, just not enough audience members. If you came to a film during the festival week, we thank you. If you wanted to, but just didn’t get there, we’d be so pleased if you could support us by spotting us a seat and buying your ticket retroactively this Giving Tuesday! We also have other options and ways that you can show us your love and allow us to continue the work that we do to support the development of film artists and help develop film culture in our region. The work that we do is important to ensure that Southwestern Ontario stories are a part of the Landscape of Cinema in Canada.
Dorothy Downs
Founder & Executive Director, Forest City Film Festival
