MILWAUKEE — The 2021 Milwaukee Film Festival has been moved to May, and will likely be virtual the festival announced Monday.
Milwaukee Film said Monday that the 2021 festival will take place May 6 through May 20 and, like the 2020 festival, will be mostly or even entirely virtual.
“As the Milwaukee Film Festival has evolved into the community-centric event that Milwaukee knows and loves, we’ve discussed extensively the benefits of moving to the spring,” said Jonathan Jackson, CEO of Milwaukee Film, in a press release. “From both a community and an industry perspective, a spring Festival would better suit our needs and serve our audience. It’s odd, but the disruption created by the pandemic has actually played a significant role in opening up this opportunity.
The virtual 2020 festival which had an attendance of 66,286 and more than 1.7 million minutes of film viewed, laid the foundation for the nonprofit to offer another virtual Festival in 2021, only six months after wrapping up this year’s event.
Milwaukee Film believes having another festival so soon will offer a platform to support a film industry that has faced enormous challenges, delays, and losses due to the pandemic, they said in a press release Monday.
“In summer, about one-third of our members told us they had never rented or purchased a film digitally before,” Jackson noted. “Our audience did a tremendous job adapting with us to a virtual platform. Many of them deeply missed being in a cinema, but they also enjoyed discovering the flexibility and accessibility of the virtual format.”
Passes for the 2021 festival will go on sale Tuesday, Dec. 1, at a special price of $75 for Members or $140 for non-members.
Prices for passes will increase on Friday, Jan. 1. The cost of one MFF2021 non-member pass is roughly equivalent to the cost of an individual Milwaukee Film membership plus a Member pass.
Milwaukee Film said the film lineup will be announced in April and tickets to individual films will go on sale when the Festival begins on May 6.
To purchase passes beginning Tuesday, click here.
