Saturday, August 08, 2009

MIFF going gangbusters

The demand for tickets as MIFF approaches final day is amazing. I have a Screen Legend membership, so I can get into sold out sessions, but trying to get a ticket for the missus on this last weekend has been a nightmare. I cannot recall any year where it's been so hard. Nearly every session tonight was sold out, and those that weren't were invariably 'selling fast'.

According to my records (ascertained by my monitoring of sold out/selling fast sessions), 115 sessions have sold out at MIFF 2009, compared to 37 last year. Given all the technical hitches (Chinese hackers and denial-of-service attacks) and logistic nightmares (withdrawal of several films, including Ken Loach's Looking For Eric and various Chinese films), Richard Moore and the MIFF board must be very pleased with the results. MIFF was boasting 185,000 tickets sold last year, so my guess is that the number should approach or exceed 200,000 by the time the festival ends tomorrow night.

2 comments:

Unknown said...

Protest outside the 10 Conditions of Love screening was a non-event. Two blokes in a shouting match surrounded by media.

Rodney said...

Why do you think this is?Is it because the cinema scene in Melbourne is nearly dead and film buffs are starved of cinema?Personally,I use to attend cinema screeings 2-3 times a week and now rely on dvd apart from a few cinematheque screenings a year.