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2019 Slamdance Award Winners
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Screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney on ‘High Flying Bird’
Tarell Alvin McCraney is an award winning screenwriter and playwright. He cowrote the screenplay for 2016’s Moonlight, based on his original play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Tarell most recently wrote the screenplay for High Flying Bird, directed by Steven Soderbergh. High Flying Bird had its world premiere at the 25th Slamdance Film Festival in January 2019 and was later released by Netflix.
Tarell talks to Slamdance co-founder Peter Baxter about his influences, working with Steven Soderbergh, being a black artist in the industry, and how the sports world that High Flying Bird depicts has played a role in the way American society commodifies black bodies for capitalist gain.
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2019 Screenplay Competition
2019 Screenplay Announcements Will be Announced here on the following dates:
TOP 100
September 16, 2019
SEMI-FINALISTS
September 23, 2019
TOP 12
September 30, 2019
WINNERS
October 11, 2019
The post 2019 Screenplay Competition appeared first on Slamdance.
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We Stole a Movie
But it’s not just an issue of economics. I don’t think the answer is to begin making cheap illegitimate movies that use the same basic techniques as industry films. I don’t think the point of breaking away from the industry standard should be to attempt to imitate its on-screen aesthetic with smaller cameras. I don’t think the film aesthetic of money or the shot-caller/grunt-worker structure used to make movies can be thought of as separate from their economic motivation. But there’s no doubt that even without money on the line in any particular instant, we are of a culture that is deeply characterized by money (even reproduced by it) and we tend to imitate those particular business model characteristics even without the presence of profit itself.
When you made totally free movies for fun with your friends on weekends, did you assign yourselves positions as leaders, order-takers, creatives, and technicians? Do you believe that characteristics like ‘leader’ and ‘follower’ are innate or biological?
And what about the film’s content? Were you trying to make something that looked like it had production value? Like it cost money? Does that mean that the cinematic aesthetic itself is also the aesthetic of money?
Who understands more about an image and a frame than the person holding the camera at that exact moment? Their boss? We didn’t tell the cinematographer what to do. We asked him what was up and he told us, unless he asked us, in which case we gave him ideas. If we treat every ‘position’ with this same approach, an oddly obvious thing happens: everybody with a particular skill set comes to the table to do that skill set, overlapping as co-conspirators, not as coworkers or superiors, getting shit done even when nobody commanded them to.
The obvious limitations that a lack of money and resources poses on moviemaking is discussed ad nauseam. I’m interested in the inverse of that conversation. What do we, the commoners without money or resources, have that film royalty doesn’t have? Are there methods and images that are informed by our unprofessional position that a hired hand and her boss can’t have access to? What if we leaned into these things instead of avoiding them in the hopes of appearing to have the money and resources we don’t have?
When a millionaire director teams up with a billion-dollar film studio to make a movie about surviving poverty, they will necessarily depict Cinematic Crime and Cinematic Poverty. Despite being independent of lived reality, these cinematic versions of real life will develop their own canon and become ingrained as truth within film heritage.
Most of us have worked on the film sets that set decorate poor-person-living-rooms with empty vodka handles on shelves, televisions from the early 90s, and a landline on a side table next to a very full indoor ash tray.
This Cinematic poor person is the twisted result of professionals expressing a distant understanding of a world they aren’t in. Then, like a photocopy of a photocopy, more Cinematic poor person depictions are made referencing the depictions that came before.
A legitimate film set also becomes limited by its own legitimacy. It must continue to make legitimate moves in its process or else forfeit its status as a Real Movie. That cuts down hard on spontaneity, flexibility, risk-taking, and experimentation since it requires that everything captured on film is technically legal.
An illegitimate film set is light on its feet and can respond to the unexpected flow of events that occur during a film shoot much faster and more interestingly. Experimentation is not nearly as risky without the heavy monetary gamble attached. A level of non-legitimacy also makes using locations you don’t have permission to use much easier. And honestly, that was essential to filming A Great Lamp.
About 2 months after we finished filming, 2 of the 7 original crew members of A Great Lamp broke off and made another entirely different feature film. This new film only required 2 people and $450, thus slimming down our on-set model even more drastically. The result is a movie with an aesthetic that is directly informed by the format of the process used to make it. Having a team of 2 people would’ve been a limitation if we were attempting to replicate a professional film technique but was not at all a limitation on our illegitimate set. It was instead an integral part of the ‘writing’ process, one of the collection of factors that informs what kind of thing we decide to make, a clear example of style informed by process, rather than operating despite process.
Don’t cling to the limitations imposed on you like they’re a comfort blanket. Quit your day job, crash on a couch, make a movie with your friends for no money. I'm telling you, don't grow up to be the old person that tells young people to be realistic and not make the movie/start the band/write the book. The only thing worse than quitting my job and being a poor ramen noodle eater who made a movie, would’ve been not quitting my job and not making a movie.
Now that you've been convinced, check out my Practical Tips for stealing a movie.
I'm Max, a well adjusted criminal and sexual deviant living in Philadelphia. For years, I've been making movies with my friends without the help of real budgets, studios, or father figures, and somehow we still make better work than James Cameron. I write zines, I'm a comic artist, and a mother of two cats. I love my friends and hate the government. <3
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Screenplay Competition Quarterfinalists
Presenting the Top 92 Scripts of the 2019 Slamdance Screenplay Competition.
Feature
432 Park Avenue by Tal Almog
A Darker Shade of Night by Wayne Gibson
Animal by Milena Korolczuk
Art In Tandem by Elizabeth Blackmer
Away With My Heart by Hoyt Richards & Lawrence Nelson II
Black As The Ants by Andrea Lodovichetti
Cherries by Matt Sadowski & Amelia Wasserman
The Company We Keep by Suhashini Krishnan
The Fall by Tamra Teig, Michael Lipoma
Ghosts of the Grasslands by Connor B. Gaffey
Grip by Craig Cambria (aka Daniel Jay)
Harvest by Paul Dechant
The Haven by Cord McConnell
House Money by Don Waldo
Invisible by Eric Weber
Invisible Prisons by Hoyt Richards & Lawrence Nelson
It’s Christmas, Where in the Fucking Fuck is Daryl?! (Um…it’s a Working Title) by Sean Kohnen & Matthew Kohnen
Jimmy Stewart and the Yeti’s Hand by Bruce Scivally
Joppatown Hustle by Michael Mirabella
Jungle by Sophie Webb & Pete Carboni
King James by Collin Blair
Margo & Perry by Becca Roth
Officer X by Michael Joiner
Oh, Canada by Peter Killy
Oh Mists, My Mists by Guilherme Viegas
On Time by Xavier Burgin
Phrogger by Tim True & Csaba Mera
Punch Drunk by Brian Bourque
Shelter Me by Sara Caldwell & Jerry Vasilatos
Suburban Gothic by Sean Armstrong
Text M for Murder by Tony Moore
Tiny, Texas by David Lykes Keenan
The Visitor by Jay Nelson
The Zebra by Paul Justin Encinas
Horror
Cherry by Jordan Prosser
Dark Web by Ron Najor, Mark Eaton
Fang & Claw by Troy Sloan
His Name is Jeremiah by D. J. McPherson
Home Bodies by RJ Daniel Hanna
Into the Trees by Matt O’Connor
London Chained by Ulvrik “Wolf” Kraft
Open House by Sean J.S. Jourdan & John Ingle
The Shepherd by Jorge Sermini
Sway by Jason M. Vaughn
Visiting Hours by Joe Bandelli & Matthew Wise
Pilot
Alienated by Bernadette Luckett
American Infamy by Evan Iwata
Animal People by Chris Gilman
Bitterroot by Maria Hinterkoerner & Kayne Gorney
Chasing Sunset by James L Head
Copper by Turhan Caylak
Devil’s Garden by Steve Wang
Dick by Danielle Nicolet
The Diamond by Juliet Bassanelli
Fermentation by Christine Garver
Fowl Road by Matthew Flynn
Halcyon Falls by Jeff Bower
Hesperium by Martin Garner
Hominine (The Tipping Point) by Heather Farlinger
Iconic by Brianna Janes
The Paisley Witch Trial by J. A. Campanelli
Parts by Craig Page
Proxy by Andrew Justice
Raven’s Cove by Natalie Zimmerman
Reflections by Cynthia Wright
The Restart by Martina Muhoberac
Somnophilia by Marc Edelstein
State Control by Dylan McDonough
Survival of the Fittest by Jaclyn Parker
Ted and his Daddy by Zeke Smith
Temp by Nikko Kimzin
Tramp Stamp by K. Busatto
The Villain’s Sidekick by Stephen Brophy
Women’s Work by Kevin Schwartz
Short
1, 2, 3, All Eyes On Me by Emil Gallardo
8 Minutes 20 Seconds by Katrina Aronovsky
A Beautiful Day by J. Logan Alexander
Chasing Divinity by Jed Tamarkin
Dig Deeper by Girault Seger
Dragonfly by Julia Morizawa
Dunked by John Bickerstaff
Give Love A Shot by Al Finocchio
Hawk Bells by Kristian Mercado
How to Like Your Babysitter by Billy Rex McAfee
Inversion by Aristides G. Kouvaras
Lonesome Demon Killing Blues by Sean Kelly
Miranda Of Mind by Bianca Ahonor
Miss A. by Theo Georgescu
Otros by Brandon Hugo Arroyo
Prairie Ronde by Connor Burke
Revolver by Beanie Barnes
Youth In A Casket by Hannah Aslesen
Semifinalists will be announced here on Monday, September 23rd at 10AM PST.
The post Screenplay Competition Quarterfinalists appeared first on Slamdance.
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Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, Reframe: Kelly Sears & Sam Gurry in Conversation
SG: People have a lot of preconceived notions about archival film. I don't have brazen reticence towards the term but I find that it can be limiting. Context is important but I'm interested in a more expanded conversation and vantage. Archives that I encounter are often created through happenstance or an outside labeling. Right now, I'm less interested in that word. I think you are too!
I’d love to hear your feelings of trepidation towards the use of the word “archive”. What is it about the term that caused you hesitance?
KS: Archives can mean so many things, ranging from an institution where you wear white gloves to online collections of documents and ephemera to more speculative organizations to institutes concerned with preservation. Some of the imagery I’ve worked with, such as presidential newsreels, exercise textbooks, instructional survival guides, high school yearbooks, military films, massage books, first aid handbooks come from such varied places, often more informal than archival.
Terms like source material or appropriation feel a little more comfortable to me. In my work, I turn away from something official and epistemological and toward something more fictive or fantastic. I approach imagery and animation through gestures of activation, response, intervention, and experimentation – terms I don’t necessarily think of when I considering larger archive conduct. I identify more with Guy Debord’s ideas of détournement and collaging imagery against the initial intention embedded in the image and a psychogeographic approach to what kind of imagery finds its way to me
Where do you find the material for your project? How does it find you?
SG: I don’t normally seek out specific objects, I wait for them to find me. I love going through garage sales, thrift stores, tantalizing dumpsters, and whatever errant pile of stuff comes my way. I was just in Nebraska for a month and visited every thrift store that I could multiple times, necessitating creative packing for the flight back. Currently, I’m working with some items I’ve rediscovered from my childhood that I’m actively seeking more copies of.
KS: This sounds like it could be a more personal work than some of your others. Is this piece inspired more so by the images from childhood or perhaps you may be in a space to make work closer to home?
SG: It’s hard to answer this question without revealing the materials just yet, which is something I’m not ready to do! It is, in many ways, a more personal piece as the inspirational source items come from my own experience. They are ideals of girlhood and a certain kind of femininity in many ways, a kind that I didn’t necessarily feel a part of or that I had access too. I’m still working out how to tie in my own experience, if at all, into the film. You’ll just have to wait.
Do the found images that you embrace ever have personal relevance or significance to you?
KS: My relationship to histories in my work has gotten more intimate in the past few years. I’ve always been attracted to interrogating American institutions and am more conscious of my personal connection and position to those structures and have been experimenting with building visual and metaphorical bridges between lived experiences and larger political incidents.
I’d love to hear how you approach the wide array of material such as photographs, breed classification guides, hard discs, email conversations, trading cards, broadcast footage, discarded family albums and even previously chewed gum. How do you find your way “in” to this material?
SG: I’ll sit with the materials for a while. I often have the objects that I’ll be working with for months or years before I concretely consider using them for a film. Why is it that I’m keeping it around? I’ll run into the problem of, this archive is already inherently interesting, what am I bringing to it? What is the story that it’s trying to tell? I write a lot, I keep both a typed and physical journal as well as countless notes in my phone. Free writing reveals a lot of textured feelings that I’ve having towards something, or someone. It’s helpful for when I can’t articulate a structured, narrative thought about whatever concept that I’m working toward.
There’s tension between humanity and technology in several of your films. Is this a conscious decision? In After Fall (2018) we see visions of the present, and possible future, through a motif of older technology. How do you feel about the presence of technology in our lives?
KS: The technology, and most often sound technology, is a means of broadcasting forms of ideological systems in my work – imperialism, expansionism, institutional power structures, and surveillance and patrolling procedures. I think about these transmissions having a mesmerizing and conditioning effect on the bodies with the consequences recognized much later. Noise plays a role here – either sonic or psychic, through a hypnotic tone, a certain frequency, or a form of interference disrupting something authorized. The presence of technology in our lives is hard to cohesively reflect on because often it’s unseen yet ubiquitous, and can produce visible, horrific results.
After Fall, 2018 from Kelly Sears on Vimeo.
SG: The body is a through line throughout several of your films. The body and its transitions, its movement. The way that sensibilities and phenomena can be displayed through our physical realities. Do you bring these notions to the images or do you seek out images that can specifically act as a conduit?
KS: The body is ultimately a receptor of these transmissions. It may be possessed by an unknown force, retreating from the physical, consumed by the dream world, or levitating due to a siren song. I hope to design the movement of these bodies to reflect a specific political or social climate surrounding these figures that they are responding to.
Are films likes Winners Bitch, jim, gutterball, and reddish brown bluish green portraits or are they something else? Do you think about the relationship you are building with the subjects of these films as you are working with images and data from and about them?
SG: I consider some of those films portraits but portraits of exactly what is tricky. They are as much about me as they are about the subject they are centering in on. Those pieces are all based on found objects. I’m making films based on one side of a telephone call, eye contact with a stranger before they exit the subway.
Respect is important. I’m using detritus, vestiges of self that somebody chose to discard. I don’t want to inflict constructs onto these real people that make me pause. I trust my stomach to tell me if something isn’t settling right. I took a lot out of Winners Bitch that actors had improved because it felt too distorted from Virginia’s reality to include. Part of that film’s intent is to explore notions of subjectivity, but there was a point that strayed to the point of absurdity and, potentially, disrespect.
KS: I’d like to hear more about how these portraits are about you as well. In what ways do you see yourselves in the animating and production of these works?
SG: I say these are portraits of me as well as they are encapsulation of myself in that moment of actively working on them. Whatever editing, sound, or visual choices I made are reflective of where I was in that particular moment in time. What did I choose to highlight? Hide? Mask? All those are shades of me in that moment.
KS: What happens to these images with embedded histories as you’re working with them?
SG: Hopefully they feel transformed.
reddish brown and blueish green from Sam Gurry on Vimeo.
KS: You often mix media in your work. How does this shape your stories?
SG: We are large, we contain multitudes. Tactility and texture are really important to me. Something like warmth, hard to replicate.
KS: I’m curious about how many modes of storytelling are needed because one through line doesn’t always cut it. I’d love to hear about how these various textures can get at the complexity of the subjects of your films.
SG: I’m looking very closely at things. I’m seeking out the textural complexity of whatever subject I’m exploring. How does they feel? Up close, and under their skin?
Ephemerality manifesting as permanence was something I kept thinking about watching your films, especially A Tone Halfway Between Lightness and Darkness or Once It Started It Could Not End Otherwise. Even when it doesn’t explicitly calcify, I find myself still considering impermanence. Tropical Depression has this deep sense of foreboding that has me waiting for a doom that never reveals itself. Can you speak to these sensory experiences and your relationship to ephemerality?
KS: What if it was ephemerality dislodging permanence? While I anchor many pieces on the effects of various institutions on the body, I often use abstract textures, visual noise, and distortion to destabilize how we read the imagery. Either way, I am interested in slippage between the official and the fantastic, the occult, the psychic, and the liminal. There is some intentional ambiguity in the aesthetic architecture for each person to bring their own experiences of distress or anxiety to their viewing experience.
SG: Through some of the robust subject matter that you confront, you inject a sense of the humor. Once It Started It Could Not End Otherwise has one of my favorite lines, “school spirit plummeted. the mascot went missing and was never returned”. This deadpan, sardonic humor really underscores the perceived hopelessness of a situation. Can you speak to your use of humor in your work?
KS: The continual consequence of institutional power and abuse right now is overwhelming. Sometimes I need some temporary relief and build in humorous phrases or moments of detour. When Walter Benjamin speaks of Brecht’s epic theater, he says revolt has a better chance when “one is shaken by laughter than when one’s mind is shaken and upset.” I think both senses of being shaken are all around. Revolt is coming. We have a lot of work to do. I hope we can laugh at times along the way.
SG: What is doom to you?
KS: I used to identify as someone who made dystopic films and thought about them as a way to come to terms with my anxieties. Now I want to think about how to navigate more effectively through them. I hope we can find a way through the doom. I think it often shows up in my work as a dark frequency or catastrophic sound design. It’s a very timely question. What is doom to you, Sam?
SG: I’m not sure. I’ve seen shades of it. I hope to never experience more than its shadow.
Kelly Sears is an experimental animator that reframes American archetypes and institutions to reimagine our own social legacies and futures. She collages an extensive range of source material such as presidential newsreels, exercise textbooks, survival guides, high school yearbooks, first aid handbooks, and other official and instructional imagery. Through combining animated photographic and cinematic documents with speculative storytelling, each of her films contains recognizable cultural narratives that use various ideas of noise to disrupt identifiable histories to engage other personal and political experiences. Her films have screened at Sundance, Slamdance, SXSW, AFI, MoMA, The Hammer Museum, The Museum of Contemporary Art Houston, and Union Docs. Sears has had solo programs of her work at the Pacific Film Archives, Anthology Film Archives, The Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, The Portland Art Museum, and the San Francisco Cinematheque. Sears is an Assistant Professor of Cinema Studies and Moving Image Arts at the University of Colorado, Boulder, where she teaches advanced filmmaking, animation, experimental documentary, and media archaeology.
Sam Gurry is an interdisciplinary artist, writer, and curator. Their films have been in the official selection at the Toronto International Film Festival, SXSW, Slamdance, Ann Arbor, and the Ottawa International Animation Festival among others. Sam received an MFA from CalArts in Experimental Animation. They live in Hollywood, California but don’t hold it against them. Formerly an antiques appraiser, Sam’s practice explores the ephemeral, unintended archives, and personal histories. They perform as one half of expanded cinema duo Saint Victoria’s Incorruptible Body with Melissa Ferrari, providing guitar and vocals. Sam is currently a professor at Cal State Los Angeles.
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Slamdance DIG Showcase Merges Art, Technology and Immersive Experience at DTLA’s Wisdome
2019 DIG Program Lineup
Art in Motion by Hayk Matevosyan
6 classic painted masterpieces are recreated using real actors, set design, lighting, costumes and slow motion cameras.
Beam by Courtney Jines
Beam is a meditative interactive fiction adventure in which players are a beam of light entering Earth's atmosphere.
Bluster Blunder by Justin Ankenbauer, Clay Brooks, David Fraile
Bluster Blunder is an absurdist racing game in which players blow into modified Nintendo Entertainment System cartridges to advance their character.
Brick, the Yes-Android by Jonsey Jones
Brick, the Yes-Android is a computer program that leads a performer through a series of short-form improv games consisting of interactions between Brick, the performer, and the audience. Brick blends technology with improvisation and narrative to examine the relationship between humans and artificial intelligence.
Chain Tripping by YACHT
"Chain Tripping" is an album by the band YACHT that was created using a range of different machine learning techniques in both its musical and lyrical composition, employing latent space interpolation, character-recurrent neural networks, and neural audio generation in combination with a DIY cut-up writing method to create very human music.
Children Do Not Play War by Fabiano Mixo
A cinematic Virtual Reality tale of the war in Uganda told through the eyes of a young girl.
Desert Mothers by Aaron Oldenburg
A meditative, multiplayer networked experience in which each player’s personal environment, composed of individualized weather and hallucinations, responds emotionally to the player’s actions. The constraints within which the players interact are discovered during play, and revolve around the body, simulated breath, drawing in the air, and out-of-body exploration of flora, fauna, and abandoned human habitations.
Glitchy Blinks by David Pripas
A social AR filter. Is this even real? Am I real?
How to Tell a True Immigrant Story by Aggie Ebrahimi Bazaz
How to Tell a True Immigrant Story is a poetic and participatory metanarrative that weaves together the experiences of members of the Latinx immigrant community in Saratoga Springs, NY as they respond to increased ICE activity and anti-immigrant sentiment after the 2016 presidential election.
I love you so much, SQUEEZE ME TO DEATH by Koryn Ann Wicks
I love you so much, SQUEEZE ME TO DEATH is an immersive dance performance with interactive video and sound installations, exploring the ways we lose ourselves loving others. Audiences collaborate with dancers and actors to experience contemporary choreography up-close; move with dancers; and become participants in the performance.
Identity by Grayson Sanders
A social AR filter that represents the ever-changing way in which we identify with ourselves and the world.
Imagine Lifetimes by Frycandle (Selected by Game Jolt)
Imagine Lifetimes is a game about choice. Shape your path through a series of life-changing decisions as you choose your way to the end.
IMMERSIVE by ARCAAN Collective
IMMERSIVE plays with the Op art concept and minimalism to produce illusions and illimited perspective. Working with projection of 3D shapes and with stroboscopic effects, this installation gives a new feeling of time and a sensation to be immersed into multiple mesmerized forms. The soundtrack is inspired by electronic melody derived from pure sinus and digital noises recreating a real electro-acoustic noisist orchestra.
Nightmare Temptation Academy by Lena NW Costcodreamgurl
Nightmare Temptation Academy is a dating-simulation/choose your own adventure/roleplaying game that is also a rap musical set in an alternate universe high school at the end of the world. Visual tropes from anime, videogames and early 2000’s digital culture are referenced and remixed to evoke nostalgia and allegorize the uniquely Millennial adolescent experience of apathy, desensitization, and confusion caused by first-generation internet addiction and media oversaturation.
Primary Assembly by Jason Snell
A musical performance by telepathy. The artist’s alpha, beta, gamma, delta, and gamma waves are processed and output as MIDI to control and play electronic music instruments.
Pug Pub by Haiwei Hou, DOOMWOOD Digital Media
A game in which players are a pug running their own pub.
Sloppy Forgeries by Jonah Warren
A minimalist take on “competitive painting,” where the goal of the game is to quickly and accurately recreate famous artworks from history. Sloppy Forgeries playfully engages with issues of artistic merit, creation, authenticity, ownership, and skill.
The Delay by Dalena Tran
"The Delay" is a five-part interactive webcomic about the lives of four characters who each are confronted with their relationship to time, identity, and media with abstracted layers of spatial, auditory, and visual reality.
tx-reverse 360° by Martin Reinhart, Virgil Widrich
What happens in a cinema when you film it at a resolution of 10K with a 360° camera and then reverse the spatial and temporal axes? In a way never before shown, "tx-reverse 360°" shows the collision of reality and cinema and draws its viewers into a vortex in which the familiar order of space and time is suspended.
Unceded Territories by Paisley Smith and Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun
In a VR world made entirely out of artist Lawrence Paul Yuxweluptun’s bold, surrealist style, the toxic realities of forest fires, poisoned waters, dead fish, spilled oil are made palatable. The VR participant is forced to question their own role in the real world and recognize the need for change.
Vertigo A.I. by Chris Peters
An artificial intelligence watched Hitchcock’s Vertigo 20 times in a row and then made its own disturbing movie.
What The Camera Sees by Gel Pen Collective, Stephanie Andrews
Step into the camera’s view and see the tale it spins about you. "What the Camera Sees" is an exploration of computer vision, video editing, and surveillance technology, presenting an AI filled with stories of spies, criminals, and secret lives. This playfully creepy experience imagines a not-too-distant future where your expected value and risk to society are constantly calculated by systems that are impossible to question or correct.
Zoe by Graeme Hawkins
ZOE is a shoot 'em up inspired by the drawn-on-film animations of Norman McLaren. Play as the titular hero and fight back against the abstract doodles of the animator and their interfering paint brush.
The post Slamdance DIG Showcase Merges Art, Technology and Immersive Experience at DTLA’s Wisdome appeared first on Slamdance.
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The 2019 Award-winning Screenwriters
The post The 2019 Award-winning Screenwriters appeared first on Slamdance.
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Test
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Meet the Artist: Allegra Jones
The post Meet the Artist: Allegra Jones appeared first on Slamdance.
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Do I need a website…?
By Sandra Bertalanffy
Do I need a website for my feature, short, episodic and myself?
As you are preparing to hit the festivals you may be considering whether to print new cards or flyers, invest in a designer, print stickers, t-shirts, come up with a costume or just really any other way to stand out, bring awareness to your film or do anything else slightly resembling marketing activity. That’s all yay. Go for it and go for it good. BUT do consider step 2!
What’s step 2?
Well, imagine this scenario: Someone compliments your film (or outfit) and you successfully hand over your printed marketing material (which btw also likes to get lost). Next, your Potentially Interested New Audience Member (“PINAM”) says: “Cool, do you have a website?” URGH. Punch in the lower region. Your body freezes, you mumble something embarrassing somewhat related to “short film,” “budget” or “first project” and PINAM smiles, nods, maybe gives you a another “Cool.” and then walks away. FOREVER! Noooooo!!!! And it could have been such an amazing mutual relationship!
That’s why you want to consider step 2.
Step 2, also known as “make its easy for PINAM to find out more about you and give the option to stay connected easily.”
So back to “Cool, do you have a website?” YAAASSS. This time you say: “Yes, of course. It’s just the name of the film dot com or my name dot com.” (you are so smooth) “Great!” says PINAM and happily walks off into the sunset (hehe). Score! Because guess who PINAM may be? Your next collaborator, a journalist, your next investor, distributor or the person that knows just the right organization that would book a film screening with you in a heartbeat, fly you out and pay you to speak to the organization or just simply give you lots of money for no reason. You never know who crosses your path and you don’t want to let that opportunity slide. (And all this, btw, states true for features (narrative or doc), shorts, episodics, or your service as sound mixer.)
So remember the simple recipe: Make it easy for PINAM to find whatever PINAM may be looking for.
AND WHAT MAY THAT BE? Generally speaking PINAM wants to find out what else you’ve done, what your achievements are, what you and your projects are about, what you stand for (do you have something in common?), what you’re looking to achieve with your film, what you’re currently working on, and where the two of you may come together. Also PINAM may want to watch your film, write a review on it, or recommend it to someone else. Fantastic, right?
So let’s review:
- Meet PINAM
- Offer PINAM easily accessible info (what are you about?/what is your film about?) + the option to connect (mailing list, social media) in one place.
Great.
Let’s take a look at what to include on different websites. Whether it’s your portfolio site, your awesome new production company site or your film website. There is some crossover and great ways to connect them all.
Make sure to include the following on your portfolio website:
- a collection of your best work (gather your Vimeo or Youtube links)
- reel (Vimeo or Youtube link)
- your bio/ statement/ what you’re about (write up some interesting stuff, you can do it!)
- press, testimonials or such (has anyone said anything nice about you? - get that in writing!)
- contact option (a contact form is a smooth solution without making your address public)
- social media follow buttons including IMDb (only professionally used accounts, and yes - update that IMDb)
- mailing list signup option (you don’t have one? Start one today, even if you’re not sending out anything right now. Do not let another PINAM get away!)
If you’re pushing your production company more than your individual self, you may adjust a tiny bit. Here is your checklist:
- work samples (best work only)
- reel (sweet and short - show off your uniqueness and show it quick)
- about (what you’re about, how you work, what you offer, pricing, approach)
- testimonials (do you have satisfied customers?)
- contact option (gather social media info right then and there in your contact form)
- follow option (make it easy to be found, followed and liked)
- signup option (for what hopefully is a valuable newsletter)
For your specific film website, consider including the following:
- title, tagline (I personally also love to see genre, runtime, related topics)
- trailer/teaser (must be found right away)
- synopsis, about (keep it short with the option to read more)
- filmmakers, cast (option to link to everyone’s further work)\
- watch (is your film available to stream? to buy? to book for a screening?…)
- social media follow buttons incl. IMDb (if you don’t have a film specific one, link to your portfolio site/your professional social media accounts)
- contact, representation, or distribution info (congrats on that!)
- call to action (what do you want the visitor to do? - more on this later.)
- laurels/achievements (whoop whoop!)
- festivals, screenings (keep this updated, it shows momentum!)
- press (reviews, quotes)
- press resources (electronic press kit, press pics, etc.)
- educational resources (study guide etc.)
All that being said, be sure to be clear about what stage your project is in and whether it’s available to watch at this point. And if it’s not available yet, offer a mailing list signup promising a notice about when it is (and then keep that promise!)
Sandra Bertalanffy is a multifaceted German chameleon living in New York and an alum and programmer of Slamdance. She is the creator of the artist doc series, KYNNSTLAH, founder of filmmakerwebsites, and an illustrator, painter and artist. Her work has been exhibited in NYC, Asheville and Miami. She is armed with a Master’s Degree in Business from Mannheim University in Germany, and decorated with the teachings of acting, which she obtained at The Lee Strasberg Institute in Los Angeles and the Stella Adler Studio of Acting in New York City. Fun fact: Sandra played Hitler’s mom in a Mercedes spec commercial.
Email her at sandra@filmmakerwebsites.com with questions, and make sure to ask about her Slamdance special offer to help set up your basic cover page.
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sLGBTdance: A Programmer’s Trip Down Queer Indie Lane
By Paul Sbrizzi
Let's take a stroll down the crooked old memory lane of SLGBTdance, shall we? And peek in on some of the randy rainbow fare served up over the years by many-gendered alt-queers in the Slamdance trattoria.
Lady of the Lake (2003)
2003 was my first year traveling to Park City as a Slamdance programmer. The entire festival staff was shacked up at the sprawling Empire House, where the youngsters would stay up partying until 4AM as I lay in bed staring at the ceiling. It was a great time, though. My friend Gianna was the festival director that year, and it's not like we had favorites, but we just adored Michael Lucid. He was the friendliest, most unassuming guy, and his short puppet movie Lady of the Lake was so gorgeous, heartfelt and funny—a wordless parable of a young gay dreamer who comes to the big city and discovers all its many pleasures and perils. At the Filmmaker Happy Hour, Michael mentioned he also had a web series called Pretty Thingsss, so we put it up on the monitor and it was something completely different: a surreal, ahead-of-its-time comedy with Michael and his friend Amanda playing all the characters. Lady of the Lake didn't win any awards, so the staff got together to create an impromptu, decided-by-the-staff award called "The Rosebud" (which understandably raised some eyebrows in terms of our process). Pretty Thingsss had some serious interest from MTV, and while it didn't quite come together, Michael became a Slamdance fixture for many years.
Winner (2003)
In 2003 we also showed Winner, a funny and poignant improvised film by Stanya Kahn and transgender artist Harry Dodge, about a videographer who just needs a woman who won a cruise to say "thank you KCLU-FM" on camera. She parlays the situation into a video portrait of herself and her comically primitive artwork—stuff like a large red candle in a transparent blanket bag or a big brown bean-shaped object taped to a cushion. Kahn pulled astonishingly quotable monologues out of the ether, and the vulnerability of her performance is a thing to behold.
Why the Anderson Children Didn't Come to Dinner (2004)
The following year, as an over-eager committee captain, I went sniffing around in the boxes of "killed" VHS tapes (back then our shorts submissions were in the hundreds rather than the thousands) and found one that looked intriguing called Why the Anderson Children Didn't Come to Dinner. Michael Lucid had actually given it a high score but somehow it hadn't made the shortlist. It was a mesmerizing, musical theater of pain with a wild, post-modern-suburban esthetic. Writer/director Jamie Travis came to the festival with his DP Amy Belling and editor AJ Bond and we all became friends. My friend, Sarah (who was on staff and would later become the festival's programming director), became besties with Jamie, whose birthday, amazingly, is her half-birthday.
The Virile Man (2004)
The Zellner Brothers, who are (sadly for them), not gay at all and are now big Hollywood A-listers, made their Slamdance debut with The Virile Man, in which David Zellner plays a married dude who calls a (real) psychic from inside an actual closet looking for reassurance about his manliness. It's a brilliant, slow-burning character study—a comedy about gay panic served very dry. The Zellners put on very convincing Australian accents for their Q&A. They and Jamie Travis both ended up having multiple films at Slamdance. One year, they shared a condo and David brought "knife car," his own invention, and Jamie ended up with a big cut on his hand for a souvenir. After a couple years at Slamdance, the Zellners made a wonderfully strange and abstract film called Flotsam and Jetsam, which to this day is the most improbable film for us to lose to Sundance. But yeah, Bob snapped it up and they crossed over to the other side, but we still love 'em.
Dirtyglitter 1: Damien (2005)
In 2005, Slamdance had a big commercial breakthrough with Mad Hot Ballroom selling at the festival and becoming a hit at the box office. It was also the year ofDirtyglitter 1: Damien by Aron Kantor, an amped and lysergic spectacular about a methed-up hustler skidding across a night of filthy sex, art and murder. "I think I need a silent letter in my name," muses Damien, out at sea with his fuck buddy Si-Moan and a dead body rolled up in a rug, as the film draws to its lovely, poetic conclusion. Aron was, and is, a lovely, poetic and charming young bear and ten years later, at Slamdance 2015, his film Deviance ended up winning a Sparky for best Anarchy film.
The Mallorys Go Black Market (2007)
In 2007, Slamdance got its logo re-designed by Shepard Fairey and Allan Moyle's Weirdsville was the opening night movie. For the short before Weirdsville, we snuck in a quirky little film that was gay in all but its characters and story, The Mallorys Go Black Market by Minneapolans William Scott Reese and JoEllen Martinson. The big sister on Family Ties was the style inspiration for three driven young New York women with a scheme to market dubiously glamorous retro fashions to Russians. A series of amazing fashion labels was the film's leitmotif; the Mallorys' holy grail was a black denim jacket with the legendary "Foxy O'Clock" label. "We're gonna be late!" "I WANNA be late!" See it for yourself:
Mariquita con Perro (2008)
I love how, in a time when we're all rightly falling over ourselves to canonize our gay martyrs and add more Alpha-Bits to LGBTQ+, gay filmmakers have also brought to life, shall we say, "flawed" gay characters. And no one has done it better or more hilariously than Vicente Villanueva in his 2008 Slamdance film Mariquita con Perro ("Fag with Dog"), a portrait of the host of a trashy Spanish reality-talk show who gets into a fight with his maid and comes unravelled as success goes to his head. "I have to have new clothes for each program.... I have very high standards," he says, "I criticize others so much that I have to be above them."
Woman in Burka (2008)
2008 was also the year when Jonathan Lisecki swept into our lives and tore up the shorts program with Woman in Burka, his hilare satire on the entertainment industry's cheap and relentless exploitation of the post-9/11 Middle East crisis. It's dark AF and kind of touching and must have been made for nothing. Jonathan worked in casting and worked his charm to bring on Sam Rockwell and Kerry Washington, as well as Sarita Choudhury in the lead role.
Vapid Lovelies (2009)
I'm starting to notice that there aren't a lot of earnest and heartfelt coming-out stories on this list. And honestly, this was supposed to be a look back at LGBT shorts in Slamdance but I've ended up talking almost entirely about heightened-reality comedies by and/or about gay men. I know, I get it. I just... I'll think about it later, I guess. So, continuing in that vein, in '09, Frank Feldman brought his sassy Salt Laker charm to Park City with Vapid Lovelies, about PJ and Skylar, a pair of spectacularly shallow and overconfident young Salt Lake homosexuals preparing glamorous outfits for their trip to Sundance. "Nobody goes to Sundance for the movies," exclaims Skylar. Frank and his stars Chris Lemon and David Luna were the toast of Slamdance and they ended up winning the Spirit of Slamdance award.
Redmond Hand, Private Dick (2017)
In 2010, I left the shorts committee and went to sit at the grown-ups table of Narrative Features; I now observe the shorts program with benevolent detachment. But I just can't not give a holla to Redmond Hand, Private Dick from Slamdance 2017. It's a candy-color-coated film noir written by Jason Kreher and directed by The Selby, starring Felicia Pearson from The Wire and Katya Zamo from RuPaul's Drag Race. A black lesbian private dick goes on a quest for a femme fatale's stolen cactus and ends up at a tartly caricaturized Silverlake party. One overheard line: "If my son turned out gay, I just... I would want him to be a top." The film is actually wall-to-wall great lines—a visual sugar rush cut with tangy cynicism as it drifts into the surreal.
It has been a pleasure to re-visit these misty, watercolor memories, to travel back to a time before the Canon 5D and the shallow depth of field imperative: the everything-in-focus mini-DV era, when a special creative freedom and improvisational spirit ran free through the ever-verdant meadows of Slamdancia.
Paul Sbrizzi is a writer, filmmaker, graphic designer and film programmer. His gay sex club reverie It Dwells in Mirrors screened at Slamdance 1999 and he has programmed voraciously for the festival ever since, and served as its art director since 2005. He has been the programming director for the Mammoth Lakes Film Festival since it was founded in 2015. He continues to write and direct—most recently the droll short comedy Buffalo Boys. He writes about music for tinymixtapes, has served on festival juries, and has programmed for Outfest, L.A. Film Festival, AFI Fest and others.
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Official Selection Features of Slamdance 2020
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2019 Slamdance Award Winners
The post 2019 Slamdance Award Winners appeared first on Slamdance.
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Screenwriter Tarell Alvin McCraney on ‘High Flying Bird’
Tarell Alvin McCraney is an award winning screenwriter and playwright. He cowrote the screenplay for 2016’s Moonlight, based on his original play In Moonlight Black Boys Look Blue, for which he won an Academy Award for Best Adapted Screenplay. Tarell most recently wrote the screenplay for High Flying Bird, directed by Steven Soderbergh. High Flying Bird had its world premiere at the 25th Slamdance Film Festival in January 2019 and was later released by Netflix.
Tarell talks to Slamdance co-founder Peter Baxter about his influences, working with Steven Soderbergh, being a black artist in the industry, and how the sports world that High Flying Bird depicts has played a role in the way American society commodifies black bodies for capitalist gain.
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The Cinema That Refused to Close
By Noel Lawrence
Last month, I flew to Rotterdam to premiere my new film Sammy-Gate at their storied and sprawling film festival. Much as I enjoyed my stay in the glorious lair of the IFFR Tiger, a filmmaker should never forget where he or she came from. And for the better part of 20 years, that place has been in the bowels of the underground: screening in squats, sleeping on couches, and struggling to achieve one’s cinematic visions in an economy of scarcity.
As a filmworker in Hollywood, I forget my roots at times. I make no pretense of bohemian sainthood. But I am nonetheless delighted to see young people taking up the arms that I have laid down.
And that brings me to the story of La Clef, a small cinema in the Latin Quarter of Paris.
During the festival, a small delegation of theatre volunteers blanketed Rotterdam with pamphlets about their cause. Without going into detail, the owners of the building that housed the cinema planned to sell it. And, more likely than not, the theatre would be replaced by a supermarket or a bank. If this happened somewhere in America, the closure probably would provoke a brief flurry of angry and sad emoji on Facebook. And, after that flurry, the cinema would inevitably shut down because such is the way of capitalism.
But my French comrades took a somewhat different tack... After the theatre officially closed two years ago, a group of activists and professional squatters broke into the cinema and reopened it to the public. With a staff of 40 volunteers, the theatre now stages free (i.e. “pay whatever you want”) screenings every night at 8pm. The shows are well-attended and patrons crowd the lobby even on weeknights.
After an introduction by a mutual friend at Rotterdam, the programmers promptly invited me to screen at the cinema. They (astonishingly) knew about my early short films and I also offered to show the “Department of Anarchy” program that I co-curate at Slamdance. Besides the pleasure of showing my work to enthusiastic cinephiles, I also had a chance to experience the sights and sounds of an “occupied” cinema. And smells... The first thing that struck me when I entered La Clef was the odor of stale beer in the lobby. In fact, the theatre sells it out of the keg for one Euro, definitely the cheapest booze in Paris!
On any given night, La Clef is a hive of activity. In the big theatre, video art by Rafael Cherkaski plays on the screen. Downstairs, patrons marvel to the rare films of J.X. Williams. In the kitchen, I partake of red wine and Corsican liver sausage with curators Theo DeLyanis (Collectif Jeune Cinéma) as well as Bulle Meignan and Camille Zehenne (Les Froufrous De Lilith). They may be anarchists but not without epicurean sensibilities.
Next door in the lobby, a group of volunteers paint a giant banner that will hang outside the theatre. It quotes part of a letter that Jean-Luc Godard wrote to Henri Langlois:
There is always somewhere in the world, at any time, the noise of a projector projecting a film. When it stops in Tokyo, it starts again in New York, Moscow, Paris, Caracas. Its noise can be a little monotonous but also uncompromising. Our duty is to ensure this noise never stops.
While this quote evokes fairly conventional notions of French cinema, the cultural influences that swirl inside La Clef are a bit more eclectic, and, dare I say, postmodernist? For instance, the first time I met Derek Woolfenden, the quasi-ringleader of the collective, he compared the cinema’s plight to the fraternity in John Landis’ Animal House. If you recall, the evil dean of Faber College invokes “double-secret probation” to expel the motley band of students from their frat house.
To illustrate his point, Derek then played me famous the scene from the film in which John Belushi rallies the fraternity to fight the college administration by sabotaging their annual homecoming parade: “Over? Did you say over? Nothing is over until we say it is. Was it over when the Germans bombed Pearl Harbor? Hell no!” While this speech hardly invokes images of the Communards or the Paris barricades of ‘68, it does seem to fit the ironic yet earnest vibe of the cinema.
Namely, this place is revolutionary but also carnivalesque in the good sense. There is an energy and sense of possibility in the air. Many of the volunteers are under 30 and embody the famous graffiti that defined a previous generation of the French counterculture: “All Power To The Imagination.” For me, La Clef is a special place because it is not just a political protest but an aesthetic one, a belief that art trumps commerce.
In the U.S., the term “culture warrior” has a negative connotation. It brings to mind a figure like Dennis Prager or Bill O’Reilly. But I’d like to see this phrase re-appropriated by the Left. When Pat Buchanan once declared in his historic speech at the 1992 RNC, “We are engaged in a cultural war for the soul of America,” I don’t think the correct response was to plug one’s ears in disgust. No! The right answer would be to say, “Bring it on, motherfuckers!” La Clef is engaged in a cultural war right now and I hope they win it.
Having bloviated longer than anticipated, the rest of this post will let the volunteers of the theatre speak for themselves. Here are a few questions and answers we exchanged via e-mail this week.
1. What do you hope to gain through occupying a cinema that could not be obtained through more conventional means?
We occupy the cinema in order to protest against its sale by the owner -- the works council of La Caisse d’Epargne (a french bank). The cinema has remained closed since April 2018 while the works council tried to sell it for a profit, ignoring the audience and previous employee expectations and disputes. We have opposed these neoliberal strategies by occupying the cinema for the last five months. It had the effect of freezing the sale.
Demonstrations or petitions certainly would not have blocked the sale nor would it have forced public power (city government and district government) to take part in the debate over its sale. What is the future of cultural goods if they can be sold to the highest bidder in order to make money?
2. Could you describe your specific demands?
We want the building to remain a cinema managed by a non-profit organization, mostly volunteer-run, with total freedom of programming, and financially accessible to everyone.
We have a “pay what you want” policy for every screening.
3. How do you keep the owners of the building from locking you out?
The owner took us to court. So as long as the trial was going on, we couldn’t be expelled. Then after four months, we learned that the verdict granted all rights to the owner. Since February 8th, we have faced the risk of being expelled.
We have tried to convince the city government to prevent our expulsion by contacting the prefect and preventing him from sending policemen to our doors.
4. How has the Parisian public responded to your occupation?
They were in favour of our occupation to save the cinema.
To be precise, before it closed (in April 2018), the neighbours created a collective to help the previous employees that wanted to buy it. But the sale to the previous employees failed and it was to be sold to someone with no guarantee that it would remain a cinema. So since September 21st, we have occupied it.
Everyone was in favour of this. We have support from the neighbours who helped us with logistical support and distribution of leaflets to alert people about the situation of our cinema. Cinema lovers have come en masse to the screenings. Each screening gets an average of 60 spectators.
We have the support of most media (press and tv), the neighbourhood, french cinema institutions, the mayor of Paris and the many directors that came to present their movies.
There has been a great show of commitment from everyone around this cinema because Paris lacks a place where we can show alternative movies, organize free screenings and program as a collective (We have 50 people working on programmation/thought meetings once a month.)
5. What can people in America do to help?
We want to put maximum pressure on the works council of la caisse d’Epargne and the city government of Paris. Demonstrating that foreign citizens and media are interested in our case will help sway public opinion toward saving La Clef.
Finally, be sure to sign the petition to keep the cinema open. Click here!
Noel Lawrence makes, curates, distributes, and writes about film. His debut feature Sammy-Gate just premiered at IFFR 2020.
As ringleader of Thee J.X. Williams Archive, Lawrence produced a body of audiovisual work that critiqued institutions and historical discourses of cinema. He has screened at The Louvre, IFFR, Slamdance, and Thessaloniki. His provocative work has been featured in The New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Vice as well as a book of collected essays on his filmography, J.X. Williams: Les Dossiers Interdits (Camion Noir, 2010).
More recently, Lawrence has collaborated on projects with Bootsy Collins and Iggy Pop as well as teaming up with the Luis Buñuel Film Institute on a lecture/presentation on the influence of surrealism in mid-century advertising. With Burke Roberts, Noel also co-curates the Department of Anarchy. As part of the Slamdance's "Emergence" festival, he will co-present a special program of short works at Arclight Hollywood on Saturday, March 28th. Follow the Department of Anarchy on Instagram or click here to find out more.
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Announcing Emergence: Los Angeles March 26-29
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Why Come to Slamdance?
Slamdance Alumni share their experiences and tips for visiting Park City
Ah…Park City in late January. It’s freezing cold, it’s the middle of Utah, and everything’s super expensive. But for just a couple of weeks, the town swells with filmmakers, film lovers, press, industry folks and celebrities. The potential for opportunities when you have a group of people like this gathered together in a small, freezing cold ski town… are endless.
If your film is selected to screen at Slamdance, there are a million reasons to brave the cold, start another crowdfund, book an international flight and do whatever it takes to get yourself to Park City. Here are some first hand insights and advice on why you should come and how to navigate the experience, from Slamdance alumni who’ve done it before.
Because it’s worth the effort.
As a foreign (French here) filmmaker, the idea to go to Park City was a bit daunting. It’s far; it’s cold; distances and accessibility seemed somewhat uncertain… but having attended, I must say that the result was worth the effort. By far one of the most communal, immersive and genuinely cinephilic festivals I’ve experienced. As a filmmaker going to Park City, you get the very nuanced impression that you don’t merely attend Slamdance but that you become Slamdance. — Sébastien Simon, One-Minded(2017) & The Troubled Troubadour(2018)
Because it’s seriously one of the best possible networking opportunities
Park City during Slamdance/Sundance is an incredible place to meet people who could really elevate your career. Pretty much everyone you meet is involved in the industry in one way or another. Use it as a giant networking event. I think even just making an appearance at Park City in January adds credibility to your work/career. — Ashley Seering, Renewed(2015) & Sanctuary (2016)
If you haven’t attended a festival or only attend festivals near where you’re located, you tend to see the same people, which is great for making local connections. But traveling to a festival like Slamdance can really expand your connections and expose you to a bigger variety of artists and their work. —Cory Byers, Renewed(2015) & Sanctuary (2016)
There’s a lot of festival cross-pollination going on at Slamdance. Both times I had a film there I met other festival reps who asked to program it at their festival. I help curate a festival here in Boise, ID (Filmfort) and I get tons of work from Slamdance for it because I like a film and (sometimes more the case) I dig the filmmaker behind it. — Matthew Wade, It Shines and Laughs(2009) & Plena Stellarum(2017)
What to expect? At the opening ceremony, expect initiation via a one-by-one self introduction. Immediately you will understand that the “Slamdance family” is no joke. Many of the films selected have back stories of direct or indirect heavy lifting by Slamdance alumni. Slamdance co-founders Peter Baxter and Dan Mirvish are two of the most usual suspects. Whatever your endgame — sales, distribution, connections for future projects, shoptalk, watching great films, etc. — Slamdance has it all, and the staff, programmers, and alumni will do all they can to help.
Personally, I’ve found that attending Slamdance offers much more than a tremendous opportunity for professional hustle. The benefits of joining Slamdance’s cross-section of “right now” independent world cinema stay with you months and years after that fateful week in Park City, Utah. — Forest Ian Etsler, One-Minded(2017) & The Troubled Troubadour(2018)
Because to make the most of the opportunity, you need to self-promote.
You spent all the money to make your film now it’s time to get a first-hand seat at a screening that can actually take your movie to the next level. Meeting people and encouraging them to come to check out your screening helps solidify a packed house and always remember you are your film’s best advocate. Hitting the streets prior to the premiere and on social media meant that distributors in the audience sat inside a packed screening room…. In the end, my film received a distribution deal that resulted in a national theatrical release, Netflix deal, and numerous streaming and VOD options for folks to see what I worked so hard and long to direct and produce. — Suzanne Mitchell, Running Wild: The Life of Dayton O. Hyde (2013)
Promoting my movie likely helped secure distribution, a small theatrical/VOD/SVOD release…pretty good for a film with a $45,000 budget and no movie stars. Down the line going to future film festivals directly led to my being hired to direct a second feature film for a significantly larger budget. — Blake Robbins, The Sublime and Beautiful (2013)
Especially if you’re coming with a doc short, or in one of those blocks that happen earlier in the day, go there to be a face to the film to get people to your screening. There’s nothing like the human connection that happens at festivals to evoke organic cross-pollination. — Beth Prouty (2010)
Because you can connect directly with your audience
At a festival you get to present and talk about your work to your audience. I think that opportunity alone is incredible. —Ashley Seering
Sometimes as filmmakers, we forget that there’s another part of filmmaking that you don’t always get the opportunity to experience: audience reaction. The actual audience reaction to your film is one of the most rewarding experiences you can have. — Bomani Story, Rock Steady Row 2018
Because there is A LOT of press in town
I highly recommend investing a bit and hire a good and affordable PR agency as the best press coverage we received for our film on the circuit was in Park City.
Having your film play at Slamdance allows you to take advantage of the press in town for Sundance as well, so you get the press that’s in town for two important festivals for the price of one. We were able to get lots of press for our film including reviews, interviews with film media outlets and TV, and some photos shoots. — Steven Richter, Birds of Neptune (2015)
The moment you are accepted to Slamdance put together a press kit and begin to reach out to media. Develop a hook to get your film noticed by journalists who cover the festivals and the surrounding region. Don’t forget to follow-up after sending media outlets your press info, a little gentle nudging can put your story on the front burner. And if you haven’t done this already, consider who your core audience is for your particular film and it’s subject matter, do your research and reach out. Target your core audience through social media and don’t be too shy to make phone calls inviting people from your core audience to attend your film. Let them know your film speaks to their interests. Email invites work too but there’s nothing like following up with a good old fashioned phone call. Now get to work. — Suzanne Mitchell
For our community of DIY weirdos
Slamdance’s commitment to truly independent cinema is 100% real spit. From all across the US, the Americas, Europe, Asia, and beyond, Slamdance gathers some of the world’s best outlier, independent films and filmmakers and cozily crams everyone into its venue on Park City’s main strip. This puts you elbow-to-elbow with a filmmaker peer group whose members are all blazing individual trails, creating unique cinematic ecosystems, and doing legit innovation — something the goliath down the street can’t offer. Slamdance is committed to growing outlier cinematic voices and ecosystems. Almost every Slamdance alumni I met these past two years has a story of professional collaboration with other alums. Personally, I later met fellow alums in England, South Korea, and Japan, and I’m collaborating on projects with several of them now.— Forest Ian Etsler
Don’t worry, it’s easy to make friends at Slamdance
Slamdance was the first major festival I got into. I felt intimidated. Even after I made it to the festival I had many moments of self-doubt showing among the talented and established filmmakers there. However, I wouldn’t trade the experience in Park City with anything else because by going there I met the most humble filmmakers and artists. My constant feeling of being too inexperienced was filled with encouragement and empowerment from those who gave me a smile back, a warmest hug or a few simple words saying how they resonated with my short film although we share different cultural backgrounds. —Cecilia Hua, Where Are You From? (2018)
It gets VERY PACKED at the Treasure Mountain Inn. It’s almost impossible not to meet people.— Beth Prouty
When someone can get up and talk after their work, then sees you do the same, it’s an instant ice-breaker. Your evening starts with polite admiration for each others’ work and ends with admissions of love after a tequila-soaked evening of too many parties and too little sleep. Some of my best filmmaker friends live nowhere near me, yet we keep in touch and show each other works-in-progress all year, after spending only a couple of days together in Park City. Same with the festival staff and programmers. I’m friends with lots of them now. You can also just as easily meet and hang with your punk rock film idols. Everyone is equal at Slamdance and that is super rare. —Matthew Wade
When my film THE SUBLIME AND BEAUTIFUL was chosen in 2014 to play the Slamdance Film Festival, I felt I had to be there…and this should be a simple thing but the catch for me however is that I struggle with social anxiety disorder therefore any social event is more complicated than I’d like it to be. But I wanted to celebrate the achievement — our film has just been picked from a group of hundreds perhaps a thousand. So why did I overcome my anxiety and go? — To celebrate. To see first hand an audience react to art that we’d created. I took it slow on the party side of things going to only two — those are for others to enjoy. I saw 3 or 4 films a day, I went to the seminars which were informative and truly inspiring. I’ve made lifetime friends and collaborators and exposed myself to hundred of films I wouldn’t have seen otherwise. So while I still struggle to put myself in social situations like a film festival, being able to do so has improved the quality of my life a hundred fold, maybe even a thousand. So when asked do I think people should go to the film festival that screens their film — my answer is a resounding yes. Just do it in a manner that feels authentic to you. — Blake Robbins
Because you’re part of the Slamfam
The Slamdance experience for me was something reminiscent of how a family Christmas holiday must feel — it’s the middle of winter, you’re welcomed with open arms and the Slamdance community is pretty much like a family — I for one don’t find it easy to engage with new people, but at Slamdance it all came so naturally.— Ricky Everett, After Arcadia (2013)
Some people I met have moved on in their careers or onto other things, but it’s great to think that we all met once in crowded-ass Treasure Mountain Inn. To be able to say, “We were there.” That’s not a feeling you get at bigger fests; they can feel much more impersonal. — Beth Prouty
Because…you just might find out you inspired Lady Gaga.
I sit at the bar of a Japanese restaurant almost everyday to have hot miso soup ramen while in cold Park City. I have some surprising conversations with the different people who sit down next to me. One lunch time, I chatted with a guy next to me about our favorite music videos. I said one of the exciting music videos I liked was Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way.” I mentioned that in 2009, I had a film called “An Unquiet Mind” at Slamdance. After Lady Gaga’s “Born This Way” was released in 2011, some of my friends congratulated me for directing her music video because they thought the “Born This Way” video looked a lot like “An Unquiet Mind”. The guy sitting next to me (who turned out to be a renowned cinematographer) said his best friend Nick Knight directed “Born This Way” and that he’d check out my film. The next day, we ran into each other at another party. He said he had watched “An Unquiet Mind”and called up the director, who explained that Lady Gaga saw my film and they used it as a reference to make “Born This Way.” He said the director apologized and said he would take me to dinner if I’m ever in London. —Rob Lo, An Unquiet Mind (2009) & A Doll’s Hug (2017)
Because sometimes we all need to feel a little encouragement to keep going
My first time getting into Slamdance was the gleaming light of restored hope on a long road clouded with festival rejections so, obviously I was elated beyond any doubts of attending.
The feeling of being in Slamdance was like finding a secret clubhouse in the woods you were somehow already a member of. A graduation thesis party where someone who didn’t go to school can shoot the shit with PHDs and film school rejects, as well as those that had nothing to do with film until they made whatever brought them here, all without any pretentious feeling of academic (or any other) superiority tainting the air.
Even though there were no direct “deals” or anything on the 12 min doc that got me in the door, many good things have since transpired and I attribute them all in part to that first trip out to Utah. If nothing else, the energy and feeling of support it gave me has carried me on until now, four years later, working on the first feature length project I have ever ventured on independently. —Sasha Gransjean, N6–4Q: Born Free (2015) & clip-135–02–05 (2017)
Go to Slamdance. Absolutely go. Don’t stay up a mountain unless you have a car built to get down it. But yes, absolutely go. I got to spend a weekend watching movies, taking about movies, watching more movies, dreaming about more movies I wanted to make. I met incredibly talented and friendly people who I’m still in touch with. And I got to spend quality time with dear friends. It was a supportive and inspiring fest, the kind of place that makes you want to keep making things. — Caitlin Craggs, Are You Tired of Forever? (2018)
Because it’s fun!
This is a great city with so much to offer: food, downhill and cross-country skiing, a whole host of parties and music. Slamdancers get a chance to meet each other through cleverly crafted activities designed by the festival organizers to create a real bonding experience. Cafeteria tray slay riding anyone? — Suzanne Mitchell
Because you NEED to.
Nothing exists in a vacuum, especially your first-time low-budget feature. Park City during the festival(s) is a madhouse. People are rushing around trying to catch the must-see film of the hour or trying to get into some party they’re not invited to. Chances are your film is starting off at a disadvantage. I mean, is it chock-a-block with movie stars? What? No? But your film is really good, right? Ground-breaking? Cutting edge and potentially genius?
Great, but the truth is, you’re probably fucked. It’s going to get lost in the onslaught. There is just too much going on for it to stand out. That is, stand out without you. Seriously, you absolutely must be in Park City to wallpaper the town with the world’s most beautiful and inventive movie poster and to pound the pavement with your charm offensive and postcard sized invites. Even if you have the bucks for a PR agent, you will still need to do as much publicity as you can and that means boots on the ground — shaking hands and being excited about your elevator pitch even after you’ve told it 2000+ times to eyes-glazed-over-festival-attendees who are so burned out they just want an open bar and for people to stop talking for five-fucking-seconds. So, something is going to have to differentiate your film from the million others playing and that most probably is going to be you.
You are your film! Who knows it better than you? Who can tell people why they absolutely must see it? Besides, do you really want to miss your screening? Hey! You’re in Slamdance! Don’t you want to be there as you are showered in rose petals and accolades and/or potentially rotten fruit and vegetables?
And if you’re like most of us, perhaps you have the desire to make a second or even third film. Just how the fuck are you going to pull that off after all your relatives have learned not to put their hands back into the film finance meat grinder? You’re going to need to expand your base of suckers. And that means industry people or rich douchebags looking to get a producer’s credit. And just where are you going to find them? Trust me, they’re not hanging outside your local Walmart. That’s right! They’re in PC looking to become something their parents warned them against wasting their trust fund on. Which leads me to my next piece of advice — when you get there, have your next script (or slick pitch) fresh off the press and ready in your dirty, sweaty, little (non-Trumpian) hands.
Look, this may seem cynical and on the surface it is, but I’m on my third glass of boxed wine and I want you to be realistic. You’re going to have a blast. You’re going to love this once in a lifetime experience. It will be burned into your brain stem for all eternity. You’re going to meet people who will be your friends and mortal enemies for the remainder of your pathetic life.
And should you be marginally successful, you’re going to need a long list of compatriots to complain to when things aren’t going your way or to ask advice from when things do go your way but you have absolutely no idea how to proceed because who the fuck else has been through the giant spanking machine that is the film industry? You’re going to need these people and with a little luck and talent they’re going to need you too. So, remember, Slamdance is a community. “For Filmmakers by Filmmakers.” You’re not an island and you really aren’t that good. You’re going to need some help. Join us. We’ll help you bury the bodies and pin the murder on someone else. And if that doesn’t work out, Dan Mirvish has perfected the art of baking a file into a cake. Be there AND be square. —Frank Hudec, Low (1995)
PRACTICAL TIPS
- Read what the office sends you!
- Have business cards and postcards with the name of your film to pass out. Put stickers with the screening times so you can reuse them for other festivals.
- Find the other filmmakers in your block and promote together. Reach out before the fest and make a group poster or postcards.
- Bring lots of Emergen-C and get your flu shot.
- Go easy on the booze and caffeine your first couple days and bring a water bottle to stay hydrated. The weather and altitude tend to sneak up on you.
- It’s cold outside and hot inside so wear lots of layers.
- Stay on the bus line if possible. Cabs and Lyfts are expensive and will have long wait times.
- If cost is an issue, find lodging at one of the nearby towns. You’ll need a car to get around but you will save significantly.
- Bring snacks.
- The Slamdance Welcome Toast (at the DGA Filmmaker Welcome) is TOTALLY WORTH IT. You get to a chance to make a strong impression even if you can’t stay for the whole festival.
Edited by Adele Han Li.
All photos by Lauren Desberg.
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The Russo Brothers Pay it Forward
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2019 Slamdance Award Winners
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