Beyond the headliners like Sundance, Tribeca and Cannes, there are thousands of film festivals around the world. These include a broad middle tier of events that may run for weeks and often feature "International" in the title. And then, there's a vast base level of film festivals run on a shoestring, last just a few days, and rely on the sweat equity of unsung volunteers. There are broad niches - for causes (environment, human rights) gender and minorities (women, LGBTQ, native peoples), by format, and on.
To stretch our meager budget and tilt the odds more in our favor, our strategy has been to focus on festivals with "Asian" and "women" themes, and to filter out all but the low-budget festivals (and a few that have waived fees for us altogether.)
Even so, with the world awash in indie films, it is clearly a buyer's market. Chatting with the organizers of POW, I was shocked to learn they had received 1,000 submissions! (I shouldn't have been so surprised - turns out mid-tier festivals easily attract thousands of entries.) Although POW has selected an additional roster of films to show throughout the year, I felt extremely honored to be among the lucky 5% (= a total of 50 films) chosen to screen during the four-day event.
Part of our problem, I was told, is that F7GU8 is unusually long for our competitive category. Festivals like to fill up the "short documentary" slot with films of ten minutes or less. Our work, at 26 minutes, is hard to program.
Lots about POW in a minute. But first, a quick word about Portland. Any place that brags about having the world's biggest bookstore, bike-able bridges, donuts flavored with stuff like Fruit Loops and bacon, and a serious movie habit, not to mention the civic motto "stay weird," has to be doing something right. No wonder the people are so nice!
A big shout-out to Portlandians Randi and Malcom, for kindly sharing their home, their bike, and their sightseeing tips... below, a few shots from the truly amazing bike route adjoining the Williamette River... and a coffee stop along the section connecting to the Springwater Corridor...
"Networking opportunities" are standard at most festivals. What made POW special was the high energy and warm support for women in film - an industry notorious for rampant gender discrimination. The POW schedule was so chock-full of informative filmmaking workshops it was like going back to college.
A charming manager for the film startup company Seed&Spark, Julie Keck, reviewed the Dont's of pitching (see powerpoint above). Then she had us pair up and practice refining our "elevator pitches" - compressing our ideas into a tight, one-minute sales talk. Mine - for the one-hour historical film we hope to find financing for - went something like this:
"I want to tell you the greatest story you've never heard. For any number of reasons, this story should never have happened - and yet, after a long and terrible war, it did. Thousands of former enemy nationals managed to come to the US and start new lives. Once you hear how they made it, you will never think the same way about women in conflict - or what it means to be American - again."
The highlighter of the festival was vegetarian/director/multi-tasker extraordinaire Catherine Hardwicke, whose resume includes the original "Twilight" feature, and more recently, a Drew Barrymore vehicle, "Miss You Already."
A few scribbled takeaways:
- Momentum for a proposed project can build suddenly and success depends on being ready to pounce when opportunities arise. Once Drew Barrymore agreed to join her film, Hardwicke had just nine weeks to assemble a budget, hire actors and crew, and find shooting locations.
- Perhaps because she has to work twice as hard to get hired, Hardwicke uses the kind of obsessive planning I've seen for presidential summits (!) To conserve valuable time (feature films cost something like $100,000-$200,000 a day) once shooting starts, she consolidates locations and rehearses actors as much as possible.
- She's developed tools like a "look book" for each character to ensure their costuming is consistent and reflects their mood (which may change during the story)... shooting schedules are extraordinarily detailed, packed with minutiae like limitations on working hours for the child actors, wig changes for a character undergoing chemo, what the seasons should look like... whew!
- Hardwicke says she is constantly on the lookout for new locations and even buys clothes and shoes as possible props whenever possible!
On to our screening at the Hollywood Theatre - a former vaudeville house with a real Wurlitzer pipe organ, which was actually played during a couple of silent films at the end of the festival.
We were programmed into a matinee group of short films:
Our favorites were a cleverly imagined B&W Australian dreamscape called "The Widow," by Katie Found,
http:// https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Cndod2o8cs and a Canadian short by Martine Gignac, "The Vocation," about a nun with dementia - and a surprising resolution.
http://powfest.com/2016-films-by-category/the-vocation/
We had a few minutes onstage for the Q&A - it went by so quick I can't remember much aside from walking onstage! But many audience members found me later, to offer praise and continue the conversation, even after my sister Rebecca and I repaired across the street for a glass of wonderful local beer.
POW, btw, focuses much of its resources into training young women in video production. The best way to narrow the gender gap? Their suggestion is succinct - GO SEE FILMS BY WOMEN!
For more about the current state of the industry, see Melissa Silverstein's authoritative site Women and Hollywood;
http://blogs.indiewire.com/womenandhollywood/
On to Tokyo, and a shift of pace...
The scheduling for our symposium at Japan Women's University was less than ideal. Students were on spring break, the rainy-chilly weather was uninviting - so attendance was modest, a few dozen academics, friends and students. But the gathering was conducive to casual conversation with many of the Japanese scholars central to war bride studies in Japan - Professors Yasutomi, Aruga, Tsuchiya and ... as at previous events, a few other university lecturers approached us for screenings at their schools.
LATE news flash from the
DC Asian Pacific American Festival - It was a sparse crowd because we were in the last set - along with a documentary on hepatitis B and three short animations...
But the venue was great, off U street near the 9:30 Club - and the crowd was fun - We stood around at the reception afterward and compared stories of Asian moms...
Karen and Kathryn were the only filmmakers present for that set, and answered questions for about 20 minutes -- how we got the film made, what was biggest challenge, what our mothers thought about it…. Lucy's mom's verdict was "Not bad." Kathryn's mother thought it could have covered more ground, and she slightly regretted some of the things she said, but overall she is satisfied with the way it came out.
It was suggested we enter the Immigration Film Festival in DC this fall.
