BCN Film Fest: a website that grows with the festival, edition after edition

BCN Film Fest is Barcelona's international film festival, held around Sant Jordi, and it shares the day's mix of culture, books and general audience. It was born in 2017 with a very clear identity: an official section that brings together film, literature and history, with novel adaptations, historical accounts and biopics, and a programme that combines artistic ambition with popular titles, including a strand designed for schools. Cinemes Verdi is its main venue, but the festival also spreads across the Ateneu Barcelonès, CaixaForum, the Filmoteca de Catalunya and the city's libraries. After its first edition, the festival commissioned us to build its website.

For a festival to work, good programming, a good venue and good organisation aren't enough: it has to be accessible across the board, and digital is one of the areas that matters most. The website is where audiences discover the sections, check films, screenings and times, and go on to buy tickets.

That called for a website that conveyed the festival's personality and was attractive, usable, fast and responsive on any device. It had to work in Catalan, Spanish and English, keep the history of every edition, and connect with the festival's ticketing system.

And it had to grow with the festival. Every year brings a new programme, with different sections, venues and activities, and the festival's team needed to be able to publish it on their own, without depending on anyone, on a platform able to add new features without having to be rebuilt.

We organised the website around the edition. Every year has its own space, with its sections, films, screenings, venues and side activities, and once it closes it moves into the archive without losing anything, starting with the first edition, which we imported when the site launched. Film and event pages bring together each title's information with its screenings and times and link through to ticket sales, and press and industry have their own accreditation forms.

We designed a website aligned with the festival's personality and built it on Drupal, in three languages, with a CMS that lets the festival's team prepare and publish each edition entirely on their own. The website launched in December 2017, in time for the second edition.

Since then, every winter we've prepared it with the team for the following edition and kept expanding it with new forms, venues and the festival's downloadable yearbook. We've also kept it technically maintained so it's always in top condition.