Video Transcription:
Hi everyone,
I’m Angela and I’m the Executive Director of the Regent Park Film Festival. I hope you’re all doing well and keeping safe right now.
As you know, Regent Park Film Festival brings free film programming to communities that experience barriers to accessing the arts. I want to thank you for supporting us and growing with us over the last 18 years and give you a quick update on how COVID-19 is impacting the Regent Park Film Festival.
We are doing our part to help flatten the curve by closing our office and cancelling screenings, programming, workshops and panels that we had planned for the foreseeable future. The impact that this has had is it has cost artists their income and it has ended training and professional development opportunities for emerging filmmakers.
As a small non-profit, this has also impacted our ability to bring audiences together, to receive funds that are related to programming and our ability to fundraise. We know that we’re not alone in this and many other arts organizations are doing their best to manage and survive and adapt in these challenging times that are filled with uncertainty. What we do know is that the arts remain an incredibly powerful way to bring communities together and we remain committed to connecting people through film.
And so I want to tell you about one thing that we’re doing and one thing that hopefully you can do right now. Something that we’re doing is over the next couple of weeks, months, we’ll be bringing you links to past Regent Park Film Festival programming that you can view online, at home, for free. So we hope this is a way that will keep you engaged and will help you experience some of our past programming in a manner that’s free and accessible to you in your home.
And one thing we hope you can consider doing, if you are able to, is to donate to the Regent Park Film Festival or really to any other arts organization. Right now anything you give to an arts organization is going to support artists, and in our case filmmakers who are really struggling right now. It will allow us to pay them screening fees to make their films accessible and available online.
So that’s all for me. I want to give my best to our partners and our supporters and to everyone on the frontlines who are keeping us fed and stocked and healthy and sheltered and connected to each other. And on that note I hope you will connect with us through our social media @RegentParkFilm and through our newsletter. Keep safe everyone.