A snowy ski village in the dead of winter. A French river locale
in the last days of spring. A bustling Italian city marked with the
first leaves of autumn. A quirky college town plagued by the dog
days of summer.
There is a film festival for every season and every
filmmaker.
Whether it’s Sundance, Cannes, Venice or Westwood’s
own Los Angeles Film Festival, festivals big and small, near and
far, have become a vital organ of the movie industry.
Where would current pop culture be without such Sundance
breakouts as Quentin Tarantino or Kevin Smith? What buzz would
“Fahrenheit 9/11″ and recent release “Marie
Antoinette” have generated minus their positive (or negative)
reception at Cannes?
While the most famous festival pictures are backed by big
studios, famous casts or “it” directors, student works
also greatly contribute to the film festival experience.
And this year, UCLA students Chris Smith and Nicole Hauser are
trying their luck.
Graduate film student Hauser has already submitted her film
“The Death Strip” to Sundance and plans to submit to
Cannes and the Berlin Film Festival, among others, later this year.
The film is Hauser’s thesis and follows a boy and his family
trying to escape East Berlin in the 1980s.
A directing and cinematography student, Hauser easily decided to
submit the film to festivals, as she has been applying to film
festivals with a great amount of success since before she began her
graduate work at UCLA.
Smith, a fourth-year theater and acting student, is a rookie on
the festival circuit. “Shadow in the Trees” is
Smith’s first feature, and he has been taking cues from film
festival guidebooks such as “The Field Guide to Film
Festivals” to help him through this new experience.
Smith’s film, which revolves around a young boy reeling
from the mysterious disappearance of his father, is a tribute to
Smith’s father and was only expected to premiere in his
hometown of Lake Tahoe once before being shelved.
“That’s all I had imagined it to do,” he said.
“(But) after the premiere, people kept coming up to me and
asking about the film.”
Smith plans to submit to large-scale festivals and also smaller
ones he is personally connected to, such as the Tahoe/Reno
International Film Festival and the Mendocino Film Festival.
However, in order to even put their works in the running for
festivals, filmmakers must endure a long, tedious and very
expensive process.
Although festivals only require a “preview” version
of the submitted films, meaning the director doesn’t have to
be finished with post-production work such as editing and sound
mixing, copying the film onto DVD to send out to each individual
festival is sometimes a costly effort, even before adding in the
application fees which run anywhere from $20 to $50 per
festival.
Thanks to today’s technology, there are always multiple
options.
Directing graduate student Erick Fefferman initially burned
copies of his dramatic short “Lights Out” individually
on his computer, but opted to have his film go the professional
route of being authored and glass mastered, producing 300 copies
for festivals.
On the other hand, Smith stuck to the do-it-yourself mode and
simply burned DVD copies of “Shadows in the Trees”
himself.
The festival applications usually only require the bare
necessities. such as a synopsis of the film, a list of the cast and
crew, and a biography of the filmmaker. This helps festivals keep
things focused in a sea of prospective applicants. According to
Adam Montgomery, manager of the programming department for
Sundance, last year Sundance accepted 200 of 7,500 applicants.
“We like to keep the application as simple as possible, so
that we can watch the films with a fresh look,” he said.
In the past couple of years, the application process has been
streamlined with the online program “Without a Box,”
which allows directors to fill out one form to submit to multiple
festivals. Festivals can then access them quickly and directly
whenever needed. Unfortunately, the paper application is still
employed by A-list festivals such as Sundance, Cannes and
Venice.
“”˜Without a Box’ is for festivals that need
more coverage,” Montgomery said.
Deciding which festivals to apply to might be the most difficult
part of the process for filmmakers due to the number and variety of
film festivals today.
“I don’t even know how many film festivals are out
there,” said Hauser. “You can’t generalize it
all; some film festivals only play experimental stuff or only comic
stuff. You really just have to read about it.”
“Everybody has their own little method,” she added.
“Applying for festivals is really like a side job.”
Fefferman is very familiar with the film festival circuit,
having found success this past year with “Lights Out.”
After submitting to over 40 festivals last year, Fefferman’s
tale of a boxer’s return to the ring was selected by 13
festivals and won a number of awards.
“The hardest part is discriminating which festivals
you’re going to submit to. At first, I submitted to festivals
I had no business submitting to, but I was just so eager to get the
film out there,” Fefferman said.
As Fefferman himself discovered, sometimes the process can offer
some pleasant surprises. After hearing about a sports-themed
festival in Long Beach called the Action on Film Festival, he
submitted “Lights Out” ““ which was not only
accepted, but took home a number of awards and an artist’s
prize for his work.
While genre might be a major deciding factor in which festivals
a director is eligible for, professional experience is not as
highly regarded.
“There are a few student film festivals, but a lot of
(festivals) don’t really care if you’re a student or
not,” Hauser said. “Some of them have special sections
““ Cannes has the student foundation that’s only for
students. Most other festivals, it really just depends.”
In the application process, waiting for a response may be the
easiest step.
“I just hand it in and let it be because you’ll
drive yourself crazy. If you put your film into like 200 festivals,
all you do is sit at home and wait for the letters,” Hauser
said. “You never know who your film speaks to, what
environment they are working in, what the theme is.”
For Fefferman, the greatest reward was not the awards he
received but the audience reaction he was able to experience
first-hand.
“Of course, everybody entertains the fantasy of
“˜somebody is going to see my short and based on that,
they’re going to want to have me write a feature-length or
see what else I got,'” Fefferman said, “But
mostly the best thing a filmmaker can gain from this type of
experience is exposure and seeing how an audience responds to the
film.”
“(“˜Lights Out’) played anywhere from Los
Angeles to Kentucky to New York to Paris to Australia,”
Fefferman said. “It just lets me know that the story
I’m telling is accessible to a broad audience, which is
important to me.”
Hauser and Smith will hear back from Sundance, the earliest
application deadline, in the coming weeks, but the journey is far
from over for both.
“This is such an important stage in my career,”
Smith said. “Film festivals are what I’m so excited
about.”