Welcome back, Thousand Islands Film Festival

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Now and then, something comes along that shows us Little Old Brockville can punch above its weight.

I experienced one such moment in 2008, when the Thousand Islands Jazz Festival brought the Oliver Jones Trio to the Brockville Arts Centre for a stratospheric evening.

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And I experienced it again in 2015 when the arts centre hosted the short-lived St. Lawrence International Film Festival.

While we are regrettably far from the heights of jazz sublimity one fondly remembers from the old jazz fest, it is reassuring to know this city can again call itself a member of the elite film festival club.

The St. Lawrence festival, which featured screenings at the arts centre and in Gatineau on this side of the border, as well as Canton and Potsdam, N.Y., was a valiant attempt to put Brockville on a global cultural map, even though it did not last.

This past weekend saw a more successful effort to do the same thing, this time entirely home-grown. After a 14-year hiatus, the Thousand Islands Film Festival returned to the arts centre, opening the local venue’s doors to, among other places, Afghanistan, South Korea and Cannes.

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Film Brockville spokesman Tony Barnes said the first year of the new edition is a success, with just over 1,000 people attending.

He was hard-pressed, however, to compare that number to previous editions.

“To be honest, we can’t find the previous numbers because it was so long ago,” he said.

Fair enough. Those numbers might not be a comparator anyway. Fourteen years ago, Netflix wasn’t even a thing, and popular cinema on this continent had not quite reached today’s level of fealty to the twin theme parks of Marvel and Star Wars.

The fact is art film festivals face a different landscape these days. In an age when my kids are sluggish on a school day because they were up watching movies on their phones, 1,000-plus people in Brockville is great.

Most importantly, Barnes notes, the film festival met its goal of breaking even, and might even have a modest profit to pour back into Film Brockville screenings or next year’s festival.

Under the heading “One Cold Weekend, Eight Hot Films,” the festival featured a screening of the South Korean film Parasite, which won the Oscar for Best Picture.

“I would say that was very helpful, no question about it,” said Barnes.

There was also a screening of The Secret Marathon, a film about the defiance of women seeking to run in the Marathon of Afghanistan, which included a visit by Sayed Mujtaba Ahmadi, deputy chief of mission at the Afghan Embassy in Ottawa.

And a reception and dinner on stage Saturday night featured an after-dinner chat with Tom McSorley, executive director of the Canadian Film Institute.

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Such things are what makes a film festival a festival, rather than a series of screenings. We get some insight into other parts of the world, and into the state of cinema as a whole.

“The richness of the experience is enhanced by that kind of opportunity,” said Barnes.

Similarly, screening the Academy-Award-nominated live action shorts, as well as the Cannes Lions, the most creative commercials from around the world, exposed local film-goers to content they would not otherwise see.

The audience included a mix of locals and people from further afield, such as Kingston and Cornwall, who came for the festival, said Barnes.

While landing Parasite long before it became the most talked-about film of the moment may seem a rare coup, Barnes is confident a similar kind of magic can happen in other years, because a late-February film festival will inevitably carry a title making headlines during awards season.

Not only does the return of the film festival open our eyes to some of the best cinema from around the world, it is also a reminder that, despite streaming services and YouTube, there is nothing like experiencing a film in a community, in a space like the arts centre.

Film Brockville is now doing a survey of this year’s film-goers that will help it “design the next episode,” said Barnes.

Here’s to many more episodes in the years to come.

City hall reporter Ronald Zajac can be reached at rzajac@postmedia.com