The ninth annual Long Beach International Film Festival is back again one year after being canceled due to the pandemic.

Movie lovers grabbed their beach chairs, put their toes in the sand and were set to watch some films.

Friday's film titled "86 D: How a Global Pandemic Rocked the World's Culinary Capital" was directed by Rob Petrone. Petrone says the film serves as a time capsule by documenting history as it happened. He says it shows how restaurateurs survived the shutdown.

Petrone says, "We broke it up into chapters and one of the chapters was adapt and pivot just showing how these restaurants said, 'OK, this is what I'm left with, what do I do next?'"

Organizers did scale back the event just to play it safe.

"We're inching our way back. We don't want to over produce an event that we then have to cut back," says Craig Weintraub, co-founder of the Long Beach International Film Festival. "We want the confidence and the people's confidence and also the health of our workers to get a little bit back to normal before we can really put on the kind of event we love to put on."

The two-night event, presented by the Nassau County Industrial Development Agency, is free.