In the 18 months that Denver Film’s Sie FilmCenter was closed during the pandemic, they kept busy. From March 2020 to the Sie’s reopening in November 2021, Denver Film kept on rolling with a drive-in movies series at Red Rocks and a virtual cinema platform.
Throughout all of this, Sie FilmCenter Artistic Director Keith Garcia started to consider how Denver Film might improve the Sie’s programming for when they could finally host in-person screenings again.
He said the way theaters exhibit films has been sort of “stuck in a rut” for decades, but that programmers have struggled to find the time and space to build different exhibition models.
“It was kind of like, the bus is already moving,” he said. “It’s hard to figure out how you’re going to jump out or change an aspect of the bus while it’s in motion.”
He said that as awful as the pandemic has been, it stopped that bus in its tracks, posing an opportunity to do things differently at the Sie.
“Something that I think has happened for everyone during the pandemic, but me especially as an artistic director and film programmer, is just trying to reinvent the way we do things,” Garcia said. “I think it made a lot of people think about what really mattered, and also what they can do to sort of do their dream idea.”
And that dream idea, one he’d been pondering for years, was a massive expansion of the Sie FilmCenter’s programming.
“I was like, ‘What Is something I’ve always wanted to do for the Sie?’ And that thing was create a true culture of film,” he said. “To offer film every single day that was diverse and different.”
