Cinequest veterans will notice two entirely new aspects to this year’s festival.
First, although Cinequest maintains its Downtown San Jose roots, much of the festival will expand to Redwood City. When the beloved Camera 12 Theater closed, that left a huge gap in Cinequest’s screening capacity that was filled by the addition of several screens at Redwood City’s Century 20 and a screen at CineArts in San Jose’s Santana Row.
This means that Cinequest attendees can no longer walk from to and from every screening – all within four blocks in downtown San Jose. There are actually more total Cinequest screenings now, but more planning is required by festival goers.
All of the major events – opening, closing, the one-screening-only Spotlight Films and the celebrity appearances will remain in Downtown San Jose. So will the Tito’s Vodka and cheese cubes in the VIP Lounge. And almost (I’ve found only one exception so far) all the feature films will screen at least once in San Jose.
So now we can say that Cinequest, literally (in the original sense), ranges from one end of Silicon Valley to the other.
The second major change is the new, additional focus on virtual reality, which has even been incorporated into the name “Cinequest Film & VR Festival”. Cinequest is presenting a whopping TEN programs of short virtual reality films. These short film programs will be presented in about a hundred different screenings in the Green Room at the California Theatre. In addition, Cinequest will present a series of VR-themed workshops, panels and forums. There’s also a VR Canteen with hospitality and VR gaming.
I don’t know about you, but I’ve never sat with forty other goggle-adorned people and shared the same virtual reality cinema. I’m looking forward to sampling the program and mitigating my own ignorance about the media. There are so many screenings of the VR programs, there’s really no excuse not to.