By Beacon Staff
The Snake Alley Festival of Film, scheduled for July 30 through Aug. 2, has been postponed with no set replacement date. The four-day event showcases the best short films from around the world.
Festival organizer Tadd Good made the announcement during a live stream on the festival’s Facebook page at 8 p.m. Sunday (July 12). He said the festival committee will keep an eye on the novel coronavirus (COVID-19) numbers, and the 125-film marathon will take place on a safer weekend. Right now, COVID-19 cases are continually rising across the country.
Good said the same movies that were scheduled for the end of July will still play at the delayed festival, whenever that may be.
“The festival is not canceled,” he said. “Even if it’s early next year, we will have it.”
Though the awards have been crafted and the T-shirts printed for sale, Good said it’s simply not safe to have filmmakers travel cross country right now. He also said some volunteers did not feel comfortable working at the festival.
“We have the best volunteers. They still wanted to help in any they could, but I just couldn’t put that on them,” he said.
Though Good had made modifications to the festival to accommodate for social distancing, including requiring masks, it would be too reckless to put groups of people in a theater, he said. Seating, which is normally around 400 inside the Capitol Theater, would be reduced to 75 with proper social distancing in place.
Good said many of the filmmakers would have to be excluded if the festival was held in three weeks since Iowa is on the COVID-19 hotspot list. Those who live on the East Coast would have to quarantine for two weeks when they returned home from Iowa.
The festival was already delayed once this year because of the virus, and Good said he hates doing it a second time.
“We would be having the festival just to have it and get it over with, and we don’t want to do that,” he said. “We want to give the filmmakers the festival they deserve.”