The Interview at Sea and its journey through streaming
Despite the delays in publishing festival reports and announcements of awards we’ve received in recent months—such as the Cefalù Film Festival and the Athens International Art Film Festival—our participation in the Los Angeles Italia – Film, Fashion and Art Festival was too important and meaningful not to share it in a dedicated article.
There were two main reasons why we gave top priority to the Los Angeles Italia – Film, Fashion and Art Festival.
First, taking part in this festival meant entering a completely different kind of event—one that was entirely new to us. The Los Angeles Italia – Film, Fashion and Art Festival plays a unique role: its purpose is to present a curated selection of the best Italian cinema from the previous year to the American public and to U.S. distributors. The festival is held every February, meaning the 2025 edition featured films released between mid-2023 and most of 2024.
It is, essentially, both an Italian and American festival whose main mission is to promote the distribution of a wide range of Italian films, from major productions to independent works.
Over its twenty-year history, the Los Angeles Italia – Film, Fashion and Art Festival has become arguably the most important U.S.-based festival with this specific focus—and certainly one of the longest-running.
The Interview at Sea was selected—no less—to represent, alongside just a few other titles, the landscape of independent Italian documentaries (within the “Docu is Beautiful” section).
While we may have delayed celebrating past milestones and awards, we absolutely could not overlook this essential step in the distribution journey of The Interview at Sea. Making a film is immensely complex and demanding, but distribution is the truly crucial phase. Once a film is completed, it only “exists” virtually unless it’s distributed—and thus, seen.
The second reason we couldn’t skip writing about this festival selection ties again to distribution: The Interview at Sea returned to online streaming thanks to the Los Angeles Italia – Film, Fashion and Art Festival, featured on the most important U.S. streaming platform dedicated to film festivals—Eventive (here).
Just over two months after our previous online screening during the Workers Unite! Film Festival, The Interview at Sea was once again available online starting February 28, 2025, reaching an enormous audience of international film lovers.
It’s also worth noting that, once the official streaming window ends, the Eventive platform continues to host the film’s full profile page, with a permanently active link to the trailer or teaser).
This was news we simply had to share—not just with our Italian audience, but especially with our international viewers.
We’ll take this opportunity to preview a few thoughts that we plan to explore in more depth in future phases of the distribution journey of The Interview at Sea.
At this point, with the festival run slowly winding down, we can take stock of a specific element of this journey: online festival streaming.
Starting with the Covid years (2020 and 2021), when most festivals were forced to either pause or go virtual, the option of hybrid or parallel streaming during festivals has grown and consolidated. Nearly all festivals today—especially the most significant ones—offer some version of this hybrid model, pairing live screenings with the option to watch selections (or even full programs) online.
Some still view this as a downgrade, arguing that it diminishes the power of the in-person cinema experience, and many opt out. But our view is that online streaming is simply one more opportunity—one that can support and strengthen a film’s festival run, especially for independent films, by reaching audiences who wouldn’t otherwise be able to attend. For a film like ours, made with and for a broad, diverse audience, this is especially meaningful.
Festival-related streaming is, in any case, bound by time—limited to the duration of the event or functioning as a brief extension—and does not compromise future theatrical distribution stages.
Whether people like it or not, online streaming is becoming the final stage of distribution: it is what allows a film to remain visible and accessible over time. Given the current distribution landscape, moving from one phase to the next is anything but guaranteed—even for larger, high-profile productions.
We’ll revisit all of this in more detail in the future. For now, though, we can reflect on the streaming path traveled so far.
The results have been highly positive, and the experiences significant. We’ve been featured on proprietary festival platforms, such as for the Ischia Film Festival (here for the platform – here for our film page), and more frequently on major international festival platforms: Vimeo for Ocean Films Húsavík, iWantTickets for the International Film Festival Manhattan, and MyMovies One for the Cefalù Film Festival.
Finally, The Interview at Sea has been featured twice on Eventive: first for the Workers Unite! Film Festival, and now for the Los Angeles Italia – Film, Fashion and Art Festival.
With this latest participation, we’ve reached our third U.S.-based festival, and The Interview at Sea has officially landed on the Pacific coast for the first time. And as we’ll reveal in our next article, this won’t be the film’s only stop in the Pacific. In fact, The Interview at Sea continues its global voyage—now reaching astonishingly distant shores!
