In the Italian narrative feature “Neolovismo,” a couple struggles to reconnect on an isolated island.

BendFilm opens on Thursday, marking 18 years of celebrating independent cinema through screenings and panel discussions. The 2021 festival boasts a bumper crop of 40 feature films, 75 short films and 10 music videos.

This year’s fest is a mix of in-person and virtual events. The online offerings begin Thursday and continue through Oct. 17, with in-person screenings taking place Saturday and Sunday only at the Tower Theatre, Regal Old Mill 16 and Open Space Event Studios.

The music video category is a first this year, but unless you were raised by early MTV VJs, this year’s biggest news is that BendFilm is now an Oscar-qualifying festival, one of just 27 festivals through which short films may find a possible path to Oscar success.

“It’s a pretty big honor,” said Todd Looby, executive director of BendFilm. “And I think what we ultimately hope it will do is just totally elevate the submissions to the Fest,” including the number of submissions. A major festival such as Sundance, he said, may see as many as 8,000 short film submissions each year, whereas BendFilm might see 800 to 1,000 of those films submitted for consideration.

“There’s a plethora of short films that we don’t have the opportunity to evaluate, let alone program, so it’s really going to elevate the whole Shorts program,” Looby said.

Still, the festival has always hosted high quality short films, among them a number of films that went on to become Oscar winners and nominees, which Looby was sure to mention when applying to have BendFilm become an Oscar-qualifying festival.

Testimonials from the likes of filmmaker Peter Gilbert, a 2016 guest of BendFilm guest and member of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences, which runs the awards, contributed to BendFilm getting its own kind of Oscar nod.

“I think that really helped us as well,” Looby said.

Working with BendFilm associate programmer Rex Carter, head programmer Selin Sevinc assembles interesting combinations of short films into different blocks.

“Rex kind of hands over the best shorts to Selin … and looks at Rex’s short list, and what she’s done is this really masterful surgical programming technique where she’s mixing and matching shorts that typically wouldn’t find themselves in the same block,” Looby said.

One might see a short doc alongside an animated that together result in a unique viewer experience “based on their themes and tones and approach, so that different kinds of audiences can get a taste of films that they may not usually see paired with other films, so they get a taste of other things,” Sevinc said.

The blocks viewers will see this year include “A Place for Everyone,” which over the course of 80 minutes, offers a collection of stories about differences. Whether racial or metaphorical or otherwise, the films help us see the universal in everyone’s experience of being or feeling different.

The 66-minute block of films in “Matters of Life and Death” “can talk about anything that has that transitional element between life or death, like literal or figurative,” Sevinc said. “Deaths and losses might be happening, but then there are also film shorts in that block with a lot of sense of humor about death, and contrasts between life and death, or life and death decision making.”

There are also two blocks of short films falling into Local Focus category, along with some 40 full-length narrative and documentary features by filmmakers from around the U.S. and abroad, including Iceland and Italy. Indie filmmakers in the festival’s competition categories are vying for $11,500 in prizes, including the $5,000 for Best of Show.

This year’s fest also includes the usual array of panels and workshops geared toward indie filmmaking. You can catch a panel of filmmakers discussing “Social Impact Documentary Filmmaking” (4 p.m. Tuesday) or “Cinema Syntax,” a two-part master class from Christopher Coppola, director of Cinema Projects and Studies and tenured professor at the San Francisco Art Institute (Saturday and Sunday).

Making festival fare available virtually last year had the side benefit of opening BendFilm to a much wider audience — especially after viewers figured out how to connect their phones and computers to their TVs.

“More and more people were figuring out how to connect into their TV, and then a bunch of people tuned in,” Looby said. “Last year … we had people tuning in from 43 states and 37 countries to watch this virtual stuff last year. People still watch this stuff. I get notified every day when someone clicks on something.”

For more information , visit bendfilm.org.