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Hamilton Film Festival celebrates its Sweet 16 with an exciting 2021 lineup

One of Hamilton’s premier festivals showcasing the latest and greatest in local and international film is about to return for its sweetest year yet.

That’s because the Hamilton Film Festival is turning 16 years old with its exciting 2021 iteration; and by all accounts, they’ve got plenty to celebrate throughout their relatively young history.

Though the Hamilton Film Festival as the city knows it started to take shape in 2004, the festival had nonetheless been running a few years prior in a much humbler format under the name Lost and Underground, showcasing scrappy independent film at the city’s beloved Staircase Theatre; a scrappy, intimate venue the festival uses to this day.

The festival’s current executive director, Nathan Fleet, has been with the festival since those earliest days, starting initially as a volunteer before getting more involved and playing a key role in the festival’s evolution year by year, helping it expand while retaining its original spirit as an incubator for small, undiscovered indie filmmaking.

“In 2004 I sat down with the manager at the time, Rob Newberry, and we talked about setting up an annual event,” recalls Fleet. “Our first indie screening took place March 2004 and we showed movies on VHS and DVD.”

Over a decade later in 2015, Fleet fully took the reins on the Hamilton Film Festival, continuing to steward the organization into the future and grow its local audience with a diverse annual range of new films, many of which are made by filmmakers right here in the Hammer.

The festival’s growing prominence, as well as its geographic proximity to the movie mecca of Toronto, soon led to many filmmakers from out of town taking notice of the Hamilton Film Festival, submitting films they were having trouble getting screened at festivals in Toronto and quickly discovering Hamilton’s immense promise as a burgeoning hub for film production.

“They told their filmmakers friends and we just kept growing,” adds Fleet. “These filmmakers started coming here to make their movies and the Hamilton Film Festival was a gateway to finding their cast and crew. We’ve had Academy Award winners, Emmy winners, all the way down to filmmakers who are 8 years old; so we are proud that this event is designed for everyone.”

Fast forward to today, and the Hamilton Film Festival continues to thrive, even finding ways of maintaining the festival’s cultural vitality during the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic by pivoting to a creative hybrid format, with some in-person screenings with limited capacities – smartly including the Starlite Drive-In Theatre as a venue for the 2020 festival – alongside digital screenings that festival-goers could view from home.

Thankfully, the 2021 festival will be largely a return to pre-pandemic norms, with some digital components still present for good measure. Dozens of films will be screening from November 6th to 14th at local venues like The Westdale Theatre, Playhouse Cinema, Starlite Drive-In, and Staircase Theatre. Additionally, Cable 14 – one of the festival’s partners – will be screening roughly 4 hours of content throughout the event.

As usual, movie-goers can expect a range of local, national, and international entries from feature films to snappy shorts, from comedies to dramas to thrillers and everything in between.

But most of all, this year’s Hamilton Film Festival is leaning into a fitting theme for its 16th anniversary: coming of age.

“From our opening night film, to our closing program, there are dozens of Coming of Age films in several genres to explore,” explains Fleet, who’s been making the most of this year’s theme in fun ways, like asking all of this year’s filmmakers to send in photos of themselves at the age of 16 to use in a collage to promote the festival.

In celebrating its own ‘teenage’ years, the Hamilton Film Festival will be screening a noteworthy number of exciting new coming of age films, including entries like this year’s festival opener Lune, a timely youth-centred drama directed by Aviva Armour-Ostroff and Arturo Perez Torres; and Lunachicks, a short dark comedy by Canadian filmmaker Jess Joy.

But that’s just the tip of the iceberg amid a stacked lineup of film screenings, panel discussions, and other special events in store for the 2021 Hamilton Film Festival; a local institution that – from promoting local film to educating aspiring filmmakers and even assisting with film production – has made clear its dedication to playing a key role in our city’s ever-growing culture as its own unique hub for filmmaking.

“We want to make sure we’re earning the “Hamilton” in our title, so we work year round to discover who is making what in Hamilton, and to give them an opportunity at the Hamilton Film Festival” says Fleet.

The 2021 Hamilton Film Festival runs from November 6th to 14th, 2021 at various locations throughout the city. Check out their website for more information and tickets.

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