(September 16, 2016 – Calgary AB) There are some interesting numbers coming out of the Calgary International Film Festival (CIFF). First is the concept (our words) of a double opening gala. This year’s festival will launch at the Jack Singer Concert Hall with an Opening Gala screening of Maudie, a Canada-Ireland co-production on Wednesday, September 21st. The very next day there will be a Canadian Gala at the Theatre Junction GRAND with a screening of Two Lovers and a Bear. The multi-venue, multi-title festival screenings begin on September 23rd.
The “international” part of this festival has always been important. For all films, shorts and features, 41 countries are represented at CIFF, up from 39 last year. The festival’s average has always hovered close to 40 since 2012. What these numbers don’t represent are several of the films in the festival that represent a country but were not officially produced there. A perfect example is The Pearl of Africa which is a Swedish production but features Uganda prominently.
As the above chart shows, the United States has the most feature entries at the festival with 37 titles, but Canada, with a much smaller industry, ranks very high with 33 films in this year’s lineup. The next largest slice of the pie chart goes to the United Kingdom with 13 titles and then France with 8. Ireland has 2 titles but that’s because of the opening Gala film, Maudie. As the publicist for the festival explains, “Total numbers account for co-productions, so if a film was a French/Canada co-production the same title would be counted toward the total number of films for each country.”
While this will over-inflate the numbers when broken down by country, this year’s CIFF boasts a full count of 210 films including 100 features and 110 shorts.
This year’s CIFF runs from September 21 to October 2. Click here for a link to the Calgary International Film Festival and other September 2016 film festivals.
