Bitfilm Festival, the first global film festival dedicated entirely to Bitcoin, is getting ready for its second annual iteration. The festival will kick off on October 31 in its hometown of Berlin, after which local Bitcoin communities will individually organize editions in cities across the globe all month long, until the closing event in Buenos Aires on December 12.
The festival events will screen a number Bitcoin-related films and feature talks and panels on Bitcoin and blockchain technology. It will also serve as the kickoff for a Blockchain developers contest.
The exact schedule of the festival events is not worked out in detail yet, but will be released soon.
“We know most of the films we'll show, but we are still waiting for submissions before we make a final decision,” festival director and well-known Bitcoin advocate Aaron Koenig told
Bitcoin Magazine.
“We will definitely show Torsten Hoffmann's 'Bitcoin: The End of Money as we Know It' and Joseph Lebaron's 'Life on Bitcoin', and we will include one or two more long films, as well as short films to open for each of them.”
The Bitfilm Festival itself dates back to the year 2000, long before the invention of Bitcoin, and originated as a festival for digital films. Koenig, who runs the production company Bitfilm, flipped this concept last year, and decided to focus exclusively on Bitcoin. Apart from the main event in Berlin, editions were setup by local communities in Buenos Aires, Seoul, Amsterdam, Budapest and Ubud (Indonesia), establishing Bitfilm Festival as the first global Bitcoin filmfestival.
“We re-invented our festival last year,” Koenig said. “It was a great experience to focus on films about this new form of money that takes away power from banks and governments. So we will do it again and hope to show even better films and reach even more people.”
In addition to the 2014 edition, Bitfilm Festival 2015 will feature an award for the best Bitcoin-related film of the year. Nominations for this award can be submitted until October 21 on Bitfilm's website. Once the nominations are settled, a voting round will be held on Bitcoin's blockchain to determine the winner.
“Each film will have its own address on the Bitcoin blockchain. Votes are issued by sending bitcoin to the address associated with the film,” Koenig explained. “The film that receives most of the donations will be declared the winner. And since voting happens in public, the results are trackable by anyone.”
Furthermore, the bitcoin used to vote on the films will serve as prize money. All bitcoin received will be distributed among each film that receives donations, the winner and the Bitfilm organization.
“Forty percent stay with the film that gets the donation, 40 percent go to the winner of that category, and 20 percent is our cut,” Koenig said. “We used a similar mechanism in 2013, and it worked well.”
So far, Amsterdam, Budapest, Buenos Aires, Mexico City, Nairobi, Saigon and San Francisco have been confirmed to host an edition of this year's Bitfilm Festival, with more events to be announced soon. The winner of the film competition will be announced at the closing event in Buenos Aires.