37th cleveland international film festival :: April 3 - april 14, 2013
Film Festival Blog
March 25th, 2011 @ 6:00pm

...Hey, where did the "rounds" go?

If you've been attending the Film Festival for the last few -- or several -- years, you're probably familiar with the "rounds" of films that occur throughout the day, to the point where we referred to them that way. Films were in "the 4:00 round," or "the 7:00 round," or "the 9:00 round," and so on. And if you've been looking through this year's schedule and planning out your day, you may have noticed that right around 4:00, the old "round" system has disappeared!

In the last few years, attendance at the Film Festival has skyrocketed. And while we love every second of that, and adore all of the new film buffs who have been finding us and finding the festival, it has created an unexpected side problem: congestion!

When all of the films in a round would go in, an eerie quiet would descend over the theater lobby, the walkway, and the hospitality suite. But then, as soon as all of the films let out, suddenly those locations would become packed. It could be hard to move around in the lobby or walkway at all, or to find a seat in the suite! And as we expanded and added more theaters each year, that congestion only got more and more intense.

So we hit on the idea of "staggering" the films starting in the late afternoon, so that we could more evenly distribute all of our wonderful attendees and avoid overcrowding -- especially in the walkway, which often has people coming through it on their way to or from athletic events in the evening. This means that the eerie quiet during rounds has vanished, but hopefully much of the crowding between rounds has been alleviated!

You may also have noticed that I'm not doing the "upcoming rounds" previews that I did in recent years. That's in part due to the phenomenal attendance as well -- when I started doing the posts about upcoming rounds, I was partly trying to drive traffic toward underappreciated films that people might not have noticed on the schedule. At this point, though, even our lowest-profile films are pulling big crowds, which is awesome, and our iPhone app can give you the same information with minute-to-minute updates. (I'm hoping for an Android app next year, myself!) So I'm going to be out and about covering the happenings at the Festival instead. (And, to my delight, Mother Nature is being very kind to us this year so I won't have to keep you up to date on any of her shenanigans.)

Anyway, except for mornings and early afternoons, rounds are history... but that should be a really good thing!

Posted by Lara Klaber

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