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‘CRAZY MOVIE LOVE FEST’ Phoenix Film Festival inching toward normalcy By Connor Dziawura Oh, here we go again,” the Phoenix Film Festival’s Jason Carney remembers thinking leading up to last year’s event. Delayed from its usual spring setting to late summer, he says the annual festival came right as concerns were mounting due to the COVID-19 delta variant. Thankfully, the event performed well — better, in fact, than the previous year’s event, which had been delayed and dissected into a smaller version of itself amid the pandemic’s early waves. Carney, the festival director, is similarly hopeful for this year’s 22nd annual Phoenix Film Festival, which returns to its usual spring setting at Harkins Scottsdale 101 from Thursday, March 31, to Sunday, April 10. The International Horror & Sci-Fi and Arizona Student film festivals are once again tied in. And Carney says he’s still seeing the enthusiasm filmmakers and audiences had toward last year’s festival this time around. “Audiences were crazy enthusiastic — and so were the filmmakers,” Carney says of 2021. “Many of these filmmakers, they played other festivals, but all of them had been virtual. This was the first time for them to have an audience, and so their excitement level was really high, and many of the audience members hadn’t been back to the movies yet, and so they were really excited. It was just like some The Phoenix Film Festival returns to Harkins Scottsdale 101 from Thursday, March 31, to Sunday, April 10. In festival tradition, posters are inspired by famous movies — this one John Carpenter's "Escape from New York." (Image courtesy of Phoenix Film Festival)
"Anaïs in Love" is slated for the Phoenix Film Festival. (Photo courtesy of Magnolia Pictures)
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kind of crazy movie love fest.” This year’s diverse lineup is projected to include more than 200 works spanning local, national and international productions, plus appearances from guest filmmakers. And over the festival’s 11 days, audiences will be able to see films from all over the world compete for awards. Films range from feature length to shorter projects, encompassing mediums and genres like live action, animation, narrative stories, documentaries and college productions — or “kind of a little bit of everything,” as Carney puts it. The inclusion of the annual International Horror & Sci-Fi Film Festival lends credence to genre pictures. Highlights, according to Carney, include director Dan Mirvish’s Watergate thriller/dark comedy “18 1/2” and the “wildly enter-
