With the proliferation of online streaming services, it's hard enough to convince people to venture out to see a movie, and in sea of film festivals it's easy to get overwhelmed.
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But the programmers of the Canberra International Film Festival hope its new grassroots focus, with the nine-day event bookended by ACT features, will give it the edge.
Returning to its former home at the National Film and Sound Archive's Arc Cinema after a lacklustre 2014, when the festival lost $50,000, the new board and Canberra-based programmers hope the shorter festival from November 5 to 15 will bounce back after several years of declining audiences.
"It's quite obvious that we sometimes drown in film festival in Canberra. It's a wonderful thing, but it perhaps means the audience are spoilt for choice, therefore it's important to make a point of difference," the festival's programmer, Canberra Times contributor and the archive's head of education, Cris Kennedy, said.
While other festivals in the territory are often euro-centric, Mr Kennedy said he and his fellow volunteer programmers Ronin Films founder Andrew Pike, producer Alice Taylor from the Central Australian Aboriginal Media Association, and Olivier Krischer from the Australian National University's Centre for China in the World, aimed to embrace genres the other festivals did not, namely local, Indigenous, Australian, Asian and documentary films.
Mr Kennedy said a boom in Canberra's film industry beginning last year with the feature Locks of Love and TV series The Code had continued this year with the recent premiere of Me and My Mates vs the Zombie Apocalypse and upcoming films such as Joe Cinque's Consolation.
"It may have been a long time coming, but I think Canberra has been riding a slowly building wave of interest in and investment in film," he said.
"We wondered when we began our programming whether [sourcing Canberra films] would be one of the challenges that'd we set ourselves, but we found we had some really wonderful films to choose from."
He hopes some of the rare gems in the line-up will also attract film lovers. Some have been seen before at festivals from other capital cities and others are new to Australian audiences, but he is remaining tight-lipped over the films until the full program is announced in coming months.
So far, restored 1957 classic The Shiralee and the 2015 martial arts film The Assassin, directed by Taiwanese director Hou Hsiao-Hsien are definites.
The festival also aimed to offer a more immersive experience around the films, Mr Kennedy said, with workshops for film lovers and would-be filmmakers and chances to meet the creators over a drink in the archive's newly refurbished gallery, which will be fashioned into a Munich-style beer hall and bar.
"It's a real chance for those firsthand conversations, hearing about the films people will be seeing and what it's like to work in film generally," he said.
Although cinema audiences worldwide might be on the decline, Mr Kennedy is confident there is still demand to experience a film as part of a community and support the film industry.
"It would take a really good pirate to find most of these online, because they're either not released yet, even overseas, or they're smaller documentaries," he said.
