The bear market may continue, but it won’t stop Bitcoin (BTC) enthusiasts and filmmakers from creating new content.
March marked the first-ever Bitcoin Film Festival in Warsaw, Poland. The event brought together Bitcoin supporters and film enthusiasts from around the world to watch some of the most well-known Bitcoin films and documentaries.
The festival, hosted at the Kinoteka theater in the prestigious Palace of Culture and Science in Warsaw, celebrated Bitcoin’s expanding global influence while highlighting the thriving cultural movement that supports the digital network. Attendees included some of the talents from the first-ever Bitcoin movement film festival, BitFilm in 2015, like Tomer Kantor, who continues to create Bitcoin-focused films.
Cointelegraph premiered a short documentary entitled The Bitcoin Farmer, which discussed Bitcoin mining using only renewable energy in Ireland. Following the film, there was a panel discussion with Cointelegraph’s director of video, Jackson Dumont, global reporter Joe Hall, Pierre Corbin of Bitcoin Film Fest, and Mark Morton and Vince Giltinan from Scilling Digital Mining.
Pierre Corbin told Cointelegraph that he and co-founder Tomek Kolodziejczuk put together the Bitcoin Film Festival because it’s a «cool idea» for the community. Although the film fest was a valuable means of introducing Polish people to Bitcoin, Pierre explained that Bitcoin «has been very popular here in Poland with Ukrainians coming here because of the war.»
Poland and Ukraine share a border, and up to 25% of Poland’s immigrant population is Ukrainian. When the war broke out, Bitcoin donations skyrocketed, and Corbin explains that people on the ground used the decentralized tool:
«The human rights foundation helped them [Ukrainians] transfer their wealth into Bitcoin, helping them cross the border here into Poland and then walk them through the process of getting their money back out from Bitcoin ATMs because Poland is the country in Europe with the most Bitcoin ATMs.»
Kolodziejczuk began laying the groundwork for the world’s first Bitcoin film festival in November 2022. He was eager to meet Corbin and screen his film, The Great Reset and the Rise of Bitcoin, at a local Bitcoin meetup. However, the idea snowballed, and their encounter and subsequent meetings led to the screening of Bitcoin films from all over the world in one of Eastern Europe’s most iconic buildings.
The festival showcased the most recent and notable Bitcoin-related film production efforts, from documentaries shot in El Salvador like Bond to Unbind to a glimpse into Bitcoin’s impact on individual lives in The Human B. Corbin explained the selection process:
«If you select the right films that tell the right stories, then bringing people from outside will understand Bitcoin from the angle that we want them to understand.»
The Bitcoin crowdfunding campaign Geyser Fund hosted a crowdfunding campaign in which Remi Forte’s The Satoshi Mystery won the community voting segment. Meanwhile, Corbin raised Satoshis, Bitcoin’s smallest denomination, for his second Bitcoin documentary, The Fight for the US Dollar.
The Bitcoin Film Festival was held in Warsaw during the same weekend as a Libertarian conference. Libertarians are advocates of reducing the government’s intrusion into daily life and were some of the first adopters of Bitcoin.
The organizers of the Bitcoin Film Festival are thinking about moving the location for the 2024 event or keeping it in Warsaw. Despite the bear market, people are still creating new Bitcoin-centered films.
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