ROLLOUT: Online section contributes to larger, broader audience

The biennial dance film festival in Macau, ROLLOUT, which was inaugurated in 2016, is currently hosting its third festival.
This edition was the first to include a program with both online and offline activities in a bid from the organizers to avoid the restrictions imposed by the Covid-19 pandemic, which makes the physical participation of people not based in Macau almost impossible.
The co-curator of the Festival, Mary Wong, told the Times that the inclusion of online activities in this year’s edition had a positive effect upon the Festival, as it meant organizers were able to include not only a larger audience but also a broader one, allowing the participation of people physically very far from Macau, who under normal conditions would not have been able to join the screenings and other events.
According to Wong, the screenings that were already held were attended mainly by local audiences, comprised of artists, practitioners and students in the fields of dance and filmmaking.
“We are still tabulating the statistics of the online and offline attendees, as the festival is still ongoing, but we are happy to say that the online screenings we held this year certainly allowed more interactions with our international submitters and audience, which was not as prominently shown in our previous editions,” Wong said. “With our online screenings taking place this year, our international submitters, finalists, and selections have brought in [to the Festival] a whole new global audience online. We are expecting both online and offline audiences to grow as more options are available. We also expect more discussions from the audience, as the Festival already reached [some maturity] in the third edition, but we will only know the outcome as the Festival proceeds,” she added.
The unexpected increase in online audiences has already promoted developments in the Festival, unveiling that it has inspired the organizers to create an online archive of ROLLOUT, which will gradually develop starting from February this year.
The co-curator noted that the biggest challenge of this year’s festival was thinking about how the influence of the pandemic shifted communications within the art sphere online and how the Festival could accommodate such transformations.
“With geographical restrictions already in place before the festival took place, we planned to take our usual sharing and discussions online. For this festival, we call them Satellite Events […] we will showcase dance films made by Macau artists in some of them,” she explained.
The organizers have already hosted an online exchange screening with DanceScreen Collective Taiwan, and will be having an online conversation with Cinemovement Singapore and another exchange screening with “Today’s Special” from Guangzhou.
“These events prove that even with border restrictions, the work of Macau dance filmmakers can still be shown in other cities, and can also [encourage] the local audience to interact more with the international dance film scene,” Wong remarked.
The third edition of ROLLOUT is taking place until January 31. According to the organizers, this year, the Dance Film Festival received over 1,100 submissions from a total of 89 countries and regions.
Together with 36 dance films selected from the special collections curated by ROLLOUT’s network partners, a total of 151 films will be screened at Casa Garden from January 1 to January 10.
On the last of the series of screenings at the Casa Garden venue, the 28 awards finalist films shortlisted for the ROLLOUT Jury Award, Jury Recommendation Awards, Audience Choice Award, and Innovation Award will be listed for the final awards.
Besides the Casa Garden, the Festival program makes use of two other venues, including the historical Cinema Alegria and the Macau University of Science and Technology Movie Hall.