As Lydia prepares for the upcoming (simultaneous) world premiere screenings of Walking the Camino: Six Ways to Santiago in Ashland and Palm Springs, we are pleased to announce that we have recently been accepted into two other film festivals as well! The Newport Beach Film Festival gave us word that they have accepted our film. This is exciting news because it is the biggest festival so far for us. To put it into perspective, Ashland attracts 7,000 viewers, whereas Newport attracts more than quadruple that number – over 30,000 people! The Director of Programming said she personally really loved our film, and that her mother is walking the Camino this year. The magic of the Camino works in mysterious ways! Newport is also where Crash, Oscar-winner for Best Picture in 2005, premiered. (That’s a hint, if anyone from the Academy is reading this…) The Newport screenings will take place on Saturday, April 27th at 2:30pm and Wednesday, May 1st at 2:30pm.
If you will be in Europe in early June, Walking the Camino will be showing in Spain at the Camino de Santiago Film Festival. We will have a special screening on June 3rd (by invitation only), and another on June 6th that will be open to the public. Make sure to check our website often for news on all of our screenings.
The very first showing of Walking the Camino will be held on Friday, April 5th at the Ashland Independent Film Festival. If you haven’t already secured a ticket you are out of luck. The first four screenings sold out quickly; top-tier festival members snapped up all of the tickets before even the regular members – not to mention the general public – had a chance to buy them. We hadn’t even started promoting the film by the time the tickets were gone. Because we were the first film to sell out at Ashland, we were offered a bonus screening. Every year, Ashland holds three extra spots for the most popular films, and we were awarded the very first one! As exciting as that news is, even more exciting is the fact that our bonus screening sold out in just six hours! This sets a wonderful precedent for the success of the film. We are so thankful to everyone who has bought a ticket already…and everyone else who tried! If you were planning on getting tickets to Ashland, don’t despair. Because of such high demand, we are looking into the possibility of returning to Ashland in May for some benefit screenings. Stay tuned for more information.
Tickets for the Palm Springs showings at the American Documentary Film Festival are still available for the premiere on April 6th, and subsequent showing on April 7th. There will be an after-party with Lydia and featured pilgrim Annie following the first Palm Springs screening.
This is just the start of Walking the Camino’s run on the festival circuit. We will be hearing back from more festivals in the coming months. Make sure to keep up with the blog and our Facebook page for all the latest festival and screening news.
Sarah LombardiWalking the Camino Post-Production Staff
U.S.A.
Your film sounds wonderful and I would love to see it! When is the film going to be available to purchase? I live in the UK.
Thank you so much for your interest! We unfortunately do not know any dates for when the film will be available for purchase, as we are in the midst of getting our film into as many film festivals as possible. One of the most important parts of these festivals is to find a distributor who will sell our film to markets worldwide. Until this happens, we can’t predict when they will be available. If we had to estimate, it will most likely be about a year from now. The other reason we aren’t sure is that we are still raising the funds to create the DVDs. If you are interested in helping out, please click here. The good news is that we may be coming to the UK soon! We have submitted to Sheffield Film Fest, Open City Doc Fest, Edinburgh Film Fest, Leeds International Film Fest, and Raindance Film Fest. It makes a huge difference to these festivals to know we have fans in the area who are waiting to see our film, so if you wanted to contact these festivals, and tell your friends to as well, it will greatly increase our chances in coming to a theater near you!
Thanks again for your interest!