Nino Simone is the founder and president of the Beverly Hills Film Festival. (photo courtesy of Nino Simone)

The Beverly Hills Film Festival is gearing up for its 22nd annual festival, and its second-ever virtual edition, which will kick off on June 1 with screenings running through June 5.

“We were forced to cancel a live event in 2020, which would have marked our 20th year anniversary,” founder and president Nino Simone said. “It was quite a disappointment as we had tons of plans and events lined up. 2021 marked our first ever virtual festival, and this year [marks] our second. We were kind of forced to go this route since 50% of our filmmakers and participants in general are from abroad. Travel was very difficult [up until] a few months ago.”

Simone said that while he misses the in-person festival, the virtual version allows for a wide breadth of content to be showcased.

“This virtual edition of the festival allows us to accommodate our international filmmakers while expanding our screening reach across the globe to a much wider audience. We have an incredible line-up of up-and-coming filmmakers, alongside celebrity-studded films that feature diverse themes promoting inclusivity and diversity amongst the film community,” Simone said.

The Beverly Hills Film Festival’s tated objective, according to Simone, is to find the convergence between today’s filmmaking and the “wealth of the cinematic heritage by edifying and developing the cinematic community through arts and humanities literacy.”

“We just decided [to] make it five days, where everybody gets to meet each other [and] network. [We made it] more of a personal thing,” Simone said.

The line-up this year includes conversations with and the work of many prominent industry figures, including the feature documentary “Roger Corman: The Pope of Pop Cinema” with Ron Howard and Peter Bogdanovich; “Root Letter,” featuring Mark St. Cyr; “The Sands Between” with Jessica Chastain and James McAvoy; “We Are Gathered Here Today” with Danny Huston; “Til’ We Meet Again,” a student film with Howie Mandel; “Not to Forget,” featuring an all-star cast, including one of Cloris Leachman’s last performances, “The 90s Club” with Dick Van Dyke, “We Are All in This Together,” with Danny Houston  and “John Farrow: Hollywood’s Man in the Shadows.”

Also scheduled to appear is Leslie Zemeckis, the actress, author and filmmaker who will be screening her film “Grandes Horizontales,” a documentary that follows several women who were A-list courtesans, and their influential, decadent lives.

“These women were the celebrities of their day,” Zemeckis said, stating these women were often misunderstood. “I like to shine a light on something that is misunderstood.”

Due to its proximity to the film industry’s epicenter, the Beverly Hills Film Festival has routinely been an important event in its two-decade history.

“Just on another level, [at the Beverly Hills Film Festival] there’s a different kind of appreciation for the technicalities. My film, I think, touches people emotionally at other festivals in other parts of the country, but I do think there’s something about industry people that can appreciate how it’s created,” Zemeckis said.

“We’re more of a film industry … competition. Heavy jury members, heavy selection, deliberations. It’s the real deal,” Simone said. “It isn’t just another event.”

When deliberating which films to include in the festival, Simone said that the organization looked for movies that have a unique, almost upstart, quality.

“There is a magical element that’ll pop sometimes, and that’s what we’re looking for. We’re looking for the accident in the film. We’re looking sort of the underdog where we can tell that you got to 90%, and then you probably ran out of funds or something tragic happened, so we root for the underdog, as well,” Simone said.

Simone said that major celebrities often attend the event, in all its forms, and are able to go incognito without being followed around by paparazzi.

“We’re in the backyard of the entertainment capital of the world. You don’t see too many other film festivals where Gary Oldman or [Al] Pacino or whoever just walking around talking to young filmmakers. It’s that type of event. We don’t exploit it. You’ll get a Sally Field that’ll pop in, but then you’ll get some masters who will pop in. You’ll get a [cinematographer] Haskell Wexler … we brought in Phil Stern who took all the famous, iconic photos of, for example, Marilyn Monroe and [Marlon] Brando and [James] Dean. [This] is stuff that most filmmakers don’t know about, and all these guys are local. They’re right there,” Simone said.

“It’s in the heart of the history of the industry,” Zemeckis said. “This is where it started from. That to me is why I like the festival, and a lot of my industry friends can see it because it’s right there.”

Tickets are $15 for a block of screenings and $125 for a package that includes the screenings, panels, seminars and the live awards presentation on June 5. For information and tickets, visit beverlyhillsfilmfestival.com