Tuesday, April 24, 2012

Film Festivals Add Outdoor Movie Screenings to Line-up

Slab Cinema is teaming up with two Texas film festivals to add outdoor screenings to the repertoire.

Hill Country Film Fest
Created to celebrate and showcase filmmakers from Texas and around the world, the festival began in 2010. In 2011, HCFF screened 48 independent films, both short and feature length, as well as hosted filmmaker Q&A/interviews, discussion panels, a filmmaker’s lounge and festival parties. Outdoor screening in downtown Fredericksburg, Texas Thursday, April 26th, 2012. Festival dates are April 26-29, 2012.


San Antonio Film Festival
Created to serve as an accessible and inclusive platform for artist in the category of cinema and provide cinematic culture to a diverse audience, The San Antonio Film Festival showcases film from around the world while nurturing, fostering, and developing filmmakers of all ages. This year will be Slab Cinema's third year to collaborate with SAFILM to feature outdoor screenings. Join us for One Night at the Pearl, Monday, June 18th, 2012. Festival dates are June 18-24, 2012.



Elsewhere:

Free Outdoor Public Screening of ‘BIG EASY EXPRESS' to Help Close 2012 Nashville Film Festival
The Nashville Film Festival (NaFF) presented by Nissan will bring “BIG EASY EXPRESS” -- a documentary and concert film featuring Edward Sharpe & The Magnetic Zeros, Old Crow Medicine Show and Mumford & Sons -- to the big outdoors, for free and open to the public, on Thursday, April 26, 2012 at 8:00 p.m. at the Centennial Park Bandshell. The encore screening, co-presented by the Americana Music Association and the Nashville Scene, will follow the film’s co-closing night slot at the Festival, which wraps that night at the Regal Green Hills Cinemas. Festival dates are April 19-26, 2012.


Gimli Film Festival, Gimli, Manitoba, Canada July 25-29, 2012 Features Gorgeous Beach Outdoor Screening Venue
The Gimli Film Festival showcases over 130 features, documentaries and shorts from Manitoba, Canada and the world, that promise informative, fascinating and riveting entertainment at four indoor venues and the popular free on-the-beach screenings. The Gimli Beach venue’s 11 metre screen rises out of the water and the audience watches from the sand. The film starts as the sunsets, and on a good night the stars and the northern lights enhance your film experience.


14th Annual Barrie Film Festival Presents Five Free Outdoor Screenings: June 2, June 20, July 18, August 15, August 29
The festival returns this fall with over 20 award-winning films from Canada and around the world, parties, guest Q&As, a director's brunch, short film competition and more!  This summer, the Festival presents five free outdoor screenings on Barrie’s beautiful waterfront. Starting with a screening Saturday, June 2 for Celebrate Barrie and four additional screenings that will be shown as part of the Lawn Chair Luminata Waterfront Series.


8th Annual Traverse City Film Festival to be held July 31-August 5, 2012 in Traverse City, Michigan.
The Festival is committed to showing “Just Great Movies” and helping to save one of America’s few indigenous art forms — the cinema. In 2011, it presented 156 screenings with a special emphasis given to foreign films, American independents, documentaries, and films which have been overlooked but deserve the attention of a public. The festival  presents classic movies free of charge on a giant, inflatable outdoor screen overlooking Grand Traverse Bay in the Open Space Park at dusk. Festival dates are July 31-August 5, 2012.


Edinburgh International Film Festival Kicks-off with Outdoor Movie Screening Events
June 16-19, the Edinburgh International Film Festival presents 'Under the Stars', a specially created outdoor cinema screening hand-picked films in the middle of St Andrew Square, at the East End of George Street. Established in 1947, the Edinburgh International Film Festival is renowned around the world for discovering and promoting the very best in international cinema - and for heralding and debating changes in global filmmaking. Festival dates June 20th - July 1, 2012.


Watch Outdoor Movies in the Snow at Whistler Film Festival
Based in North America's premier mountain resort just two hours north of Vancouver, British Columbia, the Whistler Film Festival Society (WFFS) is a charitable cultural organization dedicated to furthering the art of film by providing programs that focus on the discovery, development and promotion of new talent culminating with a must attend festival for artists, the industry and audiences in Whistler. Check the website for outdoor film events. Festival dates are November 28 - December 2, 2012


Santa Fe Film Festival Host Free Outdoor Screening
Check the website for outdoor film events. Festival dates are December 6 - 9, 2012



Recent Film Festival Outdoor Screenings

The Tribeca Film Festival (April 18-29, 2012) presented three evenings of FREE outdoor "drive-in" screenings in as part of their festival, featuring two classic films and one world premiere.


The 50th Ann Arbor Film Festival hosted 50 SCREENS, a city-wide series of free film, video and moving image installations. Throughout film festival week local, national and international artists illuminated more than fifty screens in galleries, theaters, shops, outdoor locations and non-traditional screening spaces in Ann Arbor.


The Los Angeles Film Festival featured multiple outdoor screenings, including Ferris Bueller's Day Off and Breakfast at Tiffany's. The LA Film Fest has featured outdoor movie screening events for the last several years. Read more about the history of LA Film Fest.

Friday, March 16, 2012

Outdoor Movie Screenings in Public Spaces

Our official outdoor movie season kicked off last night with a screening of the 1961 jazz movie Paris Blues, starring Paul Newman, Sidney Poitier and Joanne Woodward. We teamed up with our local jazz radio station (KRTU) and Main Plaza, a beautiful venue in the heart of downtown San Antonio to celebrate the Year of Jazz. And what a celebration! Live music from jazz trombonist Ron Wilkens and his quartet got things off to a sizzling start and the film that followed was a real treat for cineastes and jazz fans alike. Featuring an Oscar-nominated music score by Duke Ellington, a club scene with trumpet master Louis Armstrong (that earned enthusiastic applause from our audience) and gorgeous stars in a beautiful setting, this movie was perfect for an al fresco screening on a lovely spring evening.


Coming up in May 2012: Train Movies at Historic Sunset Station + Classic Films at the San Antonio Botanical Garden



Looking for public outdoor cinema screenings? The list below is what we have found so far for 2012. Please let us know of other outdoor movie series not on the list.

United States

California

Colorado

Louisiana

Massachusetts

Montana

New York

Ohio

South Carolina

Texas

Washington

Worldwide

Australia

France

Germany

Greece

Hong Kong

New Zealand

Spain

U.K.


Wednesday, March 7, 2012

The Outdoor Movie Season is Upon Us

We LOVE movies. Especially outdoor screenings of movies. There is something singularly special about the cinema al fresco experience that you cannot get from the multiplex.

We have operated a roaming outdoor cinema in San Antonio since 2002. We started out with a sheet and a borrowed projector in front of our local video store and have since grown to three inflatable screens with regular series throughout the city. In the past ten years, we have seen enormous growth in the number of outdoor film events. With the increased availability of inflatable screens, outdoor movies are literally popping-up all over.

One purpose of this blog is to promote outdoor film events worldwide. Send us your listings and we will help spread the word.

We are also interested in hearing from outdoor movie producers like ourselves. There are a lot of challenges to putting on a live movie event, no matter if your audience is ten-thousand or just ten. Please, share your stories. What works? What hasn't? What have been your worst outdoor cinema production nightmares? [One of ours: someone forgot to turn off the automatic sprinklers and they came on halfway into our event. What a huge, wet mess!]

Very Funny Scene from Portlandia. 
[Unfortunately, we've seen behavior that rivals this.]

See you at the movies,
Angela