Sydney Film Festival discovers the virtues of virtual though real life is better

It worked, says the Sydney Film Festival of its COVID-19 Defiance Edition, and reveals the numbers to prove it.

Now that the Sydney Film Festival has recovered from its uniquely 2020 experiment in online delivery, we can ask the question we really want answered: how well did it do?

CEO Leigh Small is very happy. ‘We had expected that we would have attained the same number of audiences that we would have got in the real cinema so we’d had approval from the Classification Board for that amount. But, in effect, we exceeded it,’ she says.

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David Tiley was the Editor of Screenhub from 2005 until he became Content Lead for Film in 2021 with a special interest in policy. He is a writer in screen media with a long career in educational programs, documentary, and government funding, with a side order in script editing. He values curiosity, humour and objectivity in support of Australian visions and the art of storytelling.