CHARLOTTESVILLE (CVILLE RIGHT NOW) — This year’s Virginia Film Festival drew 23,651 total attendees last week. The 38th annual festival featured 131 films from Oct. 22-26 with 47 events sold out.

Jody Kielbasa, the festival’s Executive Director and Vice Provost for the Arts at the University of Virginia, told Cville Right Now on Thursday the event broke a box office record on Saturday, calling it “a real testament to the program and the work of our artistic director Ilya Tovbis.”

“There was just a tremendous response by our community here in Charlottesville,” he said. “Particularly Saturday and Sunday, we had so many sellouts in the Paramount Theater, the Culbreth Theater and over at the Violet Crown, which are our screening venues, and just turning them around one screening after another, completely sold out.”

Kielbasa believed the interest came from a combination of anticipated high-profile films like “Hamnet,” “Jay Kelly,” and “Springsteen: Deliver Me from Nowhere” combined with a strong slate of other programming, including international films and documentaries including some with local ties like “Shenandoah” and “Pep Banned,” both of which were sold out.

He also highlighted “key moments” that the community responded to, like Miles Caton’s discussion and performance following the screening of “Sinners,” which Kielbasa called “just remarkable,” and “Jay Kelly” composer Nicholas Britell’s interview for the “Awards Chatter” Podcast, hosted by The Hollywood Reporter’s executive editor of awards coverage Scott Feinberg, following the film’s screening which featured Britell hoping over to a piano to break down some of his most famous compositions.

“So many great moments during the festival for our audience,” Kielbasa said.

Now with the 38th Annual festival in the rearview mirror, Kielbasa said the staff will soon meet within the next few weeks, as they do every year, to hold “a post-mortem, so to speak” to put the festival to rest and discuss what went well and what didn’t.

“Most everything went well at this year’s festival,” he said, “but we always look at stuff and say, ‘That went well, but can we make it even better.'”

Then, the staff will wait until the Sundance Film Festival in January to kick off the next year’s festival circuit. Kielbasa said he and his staff often travel to different festivals leading up to Virginia’s event to see films that could be a part of their upcoming lineup, and the process of selecting a lineup is often very fluid.

“We announce 30 days out,” he said, “and very often until the day we announce, we’re making changes to the schedules. This year we added two films after we announced our schedule that we had no idea we were gonna get.”

The festival also does a call for entries, with “Pep Banned” arriving to the festival through that process. All-in-all, Kielbasa said only time will tell what the 39th annual festival will bring.

“Every festival is unique,” he said, “so I have no idea what’s in store for next year, nor would I want to share that if I did.”