The North of Superior Film Association’s annual film festival has lived to see another day.
Make that two days.
A year after losing its traditional home at the now closed second-run Cumberland Cinema, NOSFA’s search for a new venue has come to a happy conclusion, on Friday said festival organizer Marty Mascarin. The event will now be staged on four screens a the SilverCity Thunder Bay. But instead of being a weekend-long affair, the festival will be split over two consecutive Sundays, starting on March 21 and concluding a week later on March 28.
Mascarin said NOSFA’s executive spent the past year looking for alternatives, and the desire to keep the 35-millimetre format made SilverCity a natural fit. While the 2010 edition will be a slightly scaled-back model, Mascarin said there will still be plenty of diversity to go around.
"We’ll be running roughly about 16 titles, so we will still have a pretty good selection of films running for that time," he said.
He admitted not as many people are going to be able to attend all the films they want to see, due to customer demand, but he’s confident the enthusiasm will still be there. Unfortunately, they had make the best of the circumstances afforded them.
According to Mascarin corporate rules preclude outside events from being at SilverCity cinemas for more than one night in a row, especially on a weekend. They were lucky that the parent company accepted the second of two proposals put forth to them.
"That’s really tough, because that’s golden time for a theatre," he said of securing the coveted Sunday date. "They’re also contractually bound to their distributors. To provide us the kind of latitude that we were used to is really, really tricky, and in actual fact we’re very thankful for what we have."
Mascarin is hoping it’s a permanent move.
One thing that hasn’t changed is the quality of films being brought into Thunder Bay. Among the most anticipated is Woody Harrelson’s The Messenger, a plot that sees Harrelson playing a military man whose job it to tell next of kin their loved one has died.
Other titles include the Oscar nominated A Single Man, starring Colin Firth, and Canadian filmmaker Xavier Dolan’s I Killed My Mother.
Ticket prices will be going up, Mascarin said. The cost of a six-pack of tickets jumps $5 to $30, an increase that is necessary because of the smaller size of the festival. However, he added, prices have remained static for much of the festival’s 16-year history, and an increase was probably due anyway.
