Newport Beach Film Festival returns in full force, now permanently in the fall
The 23rd annual Newport Beach Film Festival returns to the city’s movie theaters this Thursday.
The festival will open Thursday night at the Edwards Big Newport on 300 Newport Center Drive with a screening of “WEIRD: The Al Yankovic Story,” a musical biopic starring Daniel Radcliffe, Evan Rachel Wood, Rainn Wilson, Toby Huss, Julianne Nicholson and Quinta Brunson.
Throughout the festival’s eight-day run, dozens of feature films and documentaries will hit the silver screen, along with scores of other films about music, food, the environment and art, architecture and sports.
It will close on Oct. 20 with a screening of “Glass Onion: A Knives Out Mystery,” the much-anticipated sequel to Rian Johnson’s successful comedic thriller “Knives Out,” released in 2019.
Festival chief executive officer and executive director Gregg Schwenk said this year’s festival has the strongest lineup ever — a far cry from the worry he and co-founder Todd Quartararo felt at the onset of the coronavirus pandemic in March 2020.
“If you take a step back and look at the success of the festival over the first 20 years, we are very proud of a number of awards titles that we were able to work with ... and [built] up an audience of nearly 60,000 people in 2019. We had become the largest film festival in coastal Southern California and ... then COVID hit less than a month prior to our 2020 festival,” Schwenk said. “It was devastating financially and psychologically.”
Schwenk said organizers were able to scramble and pivot online that October after delaying the event in hopes pandemic restrictions would lighten, but the damage had already been done. Schwenk said the Newport Beach Film Festival as an organization would likely feel the ill effects of the setback for years to come.
Still, not all changes were wholly unwelcome.
The festival was held in person in October last year. It had traditionally been held in April, but Quartararo said the change in position from spring to fall puts the Newport Beach Film Festival in line with what is considered Oscar season. He noted a fall festival is a “hot spot for films on their award campaigns.”
Planning for this year’s event began shortly after the festival’s 2021 run. In fact, organizers say they are already beginning to plan for the festivals in 2023 and 2024 — the latter of which will mark the event’s 25th anniversary.
“It’s really kind of exciting to see what happened to the festival post-COVID, and we’re coming out with this giant spotlight on Newport Beach. What happened last year was that we were half in because people were still under COVID restrictions,” Quartararo said.
“We did as much as we could outside and did testing, but now we’re fully back up and running,” Quartararo said, nodding to support that the festival has received from Hollywood. “We joke that, ‘Why we didn’t do this sooner?’”
Schwenk said the festival provides a unique opportunity for the community to see films before they hit major theaters or streaming. It also allows film devotees to meet those both in front of and behind the camera throughout the festival’s eight-day run.
“I think we had become a major event in the fabric of our community and obviously being hit so hard by the shutdown, we questioned whether we could move forward,” said Shwenk. “Todd and I realized that we had put in over two decades of our lives in this, that the community had really embraced the Newport Beach Film Festival and we knew we had to continue moving forward.”
Schwenk said the festival reflects the “caliber and quality of our community” and puts the fun back in seeing films in theaters the way they are meant to be seen in a way that is accessible to Newport Beach residents and visitors.
“There are film festivals out there that put a price point on general tickets that make it impossible for anybody to go. They program films that the majority of people wouldn’t want to see or they host events that really don’t reflect the beauty of their community,” Schwenk said. “The Newport Beach Film Festival has always tried to host events that are reflective of the natural beauty of Newport Beach and our surrounding community.”
For more information on the festival’s schedule or to buy tickets to screenings, visit newportbeachfilmfest.com.
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