“Another year, another New/Next” looks to become a certainty in Baltimore. After last year’s inaugural festival, it wasn’t known if New/Next Film Festival was a one-off event or if the Maryland Film Festival would return from hiatus. In 2024, both happened a couple months and a block apart in Station North, and both announced on their closing nights that they will be back for 2025. For the foreseeable future, Baltimore has two tentpole, unjuried independent film festivals; what is not certain is how they are going to interplay with each other as establishments, rather than events with question marks attached. MdFF bookended itself with speeches from Maryland’s governor and Baltimore’s mayor, while New/Next kept it less formal, opening and closing with remarks from the fest’s main sponsor (local NPR affiliate WYPR) as well as the fest’s co-founder and lead programmer, Eric Allen Hatch. MdFF, as I reported back in May, came back with institutional force; New/Next is here by sheer force of will.
This year’s lineup was massively expanded: the inaugural festival hosted 75 films as opposed to this year’s 126 (23 features and 52 shorts vs. 37 features and 89 shorts), a 68% increase taking over all five screens of The Charles Theater (from four last year) for three full days plus an opening night. Over 200 people were there representing films, and Hatch noted that while the fest had the budget to pay for and accommodate for one person for each feature, that was not the case for short filmmakers—meaning New/Next was seen as worth it to the vast majority of industry attendees to travel to Baltimore on their own dime. It verged on too much. Indeed, it would be physically impossible to see everything (nor is it wholly necessary), and despite having spent 12 hours a day at The Charles I keep running into friends around town who went to multiple screenings and never once crossed paths in the theater’s short hallway. Having too many good offerings is probably the best problem a film festival could have, especially one only in its sophomore edition, and it’ll be up to subsequent ones to see how much more the fest can stretch its legs out, what sort of turnout it can maintain or bolster through playing films more times or how many calendar days it can sustainably expand to.
Read full article: DIY Baltimore: New/Next Film Festival 2024 – Filmmaker Magazine
