The Festival is back in town. In time as every fall, the Sitges - International Fantastic Film Festival of Catalonia presents a billboard combining the best international fantastic cinema with works by small low budget producers, even filmed with a mobile phone, as some illustrative case. The crisis also rages the film industry, but at the same time, and it seems paradoxical, also creates new opportunities and new entrepreneurs. And our Festival, which is sensitive to new media platforms, readily welcomes them.
Sitges greets a new Festival edition with the enthusiasm that we all share when something that we consider ours makes the headlines. The Festival is well established as the most important international fantastic film festival and has become a major Catalonian cultural platform. Councilor Ferran Mascarell declared so at the press conference that we organized past Monday that counted with the presence of hundreds of reporters: the contribution made by the Catalan Government in Sitges is the most important, quantitatively of all contributions made to film festivals.
For Sitges, the Festival is a very important tool in promoting tourism and has an extraordinary impact. The figures associated with the Festival are quite revealing: 300 million people read about the Festival in the press, 65 million television viewers, a campaign worth millions of Euros, news of international caliber hitting the world ... The profits generated by the Film Festival in the projection of the Sitges brand, and its positioning as a venue for cultural activities and top international events are impossible to assess.
For this reason, the Film Festival is a priority in the promotion policy of Sitges and in the cultural and institutional agenda of our local government. We've been working to contribute to the projection, despite the complex and difficult financial situation in which we live.
Meanwhile, for the city government is very important to stress the homegrown nature of the Sitges Film Festival. The director stressed it at press conference: the Festival has always been and will always be from Sitges. But the significant growth that the event has undergone in the last fifteen years, provoked, among other factors, by the availability of a large and complete facility in the Auditorium, has caused some loss in the local ambiance that once existed in the streets of Sitges during every Festival.
We are working hard to reverse this trend and for this reason, we have undertaken several initiatives so people outside Aiguadolç can experience the Festival. For the second consecutive year, we have a double opening session at the Retiro and a double closing at the Prado. We recovered the shop window competition, just as two years ago we recovered the Fantastic Menu.
We have also opened a new lounge with free screenings at the Hort de Can Falç. This year, an architectural and artistic landmark such as the Palau Maricel will join the Festival activities offering posters of all editions of the event, as part of the funds of the Historical Archive of Sitges. Venues such as the Espai Jove or the Swimming Pool were also added to the Festival with different activities…
