This is going to be a short update as I’m still trying to get over something that has me coughing like a 95-year-old chain smoker. So, please excuse my shortness.
FILM SELECTION
Yesterday is one of the hardest days of running the Shenandoah Film Collaborative. It’s called selection day. That’s when we tell the 2,793 filmmakers who submitted to our 2nd International Film Festival if they made it in.
It’s never easy to tell people that they didn’t make the cut because it’s not easy to make a film. If a filmmaker is truly dedicated to their craft, they will put in a lot of effort into making their art and to me, that’s not fair that we can’t showcase their work.
But technically, if we did show everyone’s film, then our festival would have to run 71 straight days non-stop to get all of their films in. The unemployment rate would skyrocket.
We made a strong push this year to the filmmakers to please stay connected with us because we want to still collaborate with them in the future, as we begin phase three of our organizational growth.
GROWING AS AN ORGANIZATION
The first phase was to basically learn what we want to be when we grow up, and I mean that in a philosophical sense.
That involves showing films in small businesses around Shenandoah County and holding a film festival.
Phase two involved getting the necessary resources to show films outdoors. That way you can make yourself more available to a bigger audience and show a wider variety of films – from classic to modern cinema.
Now, we still haven’t perfected ourselves to say that we’ve mastered phases one and two, but we’re in a good position right now as an organization to start to develop more educational programs in our area of operations, and we will need input from the filmmaker community.
That’s why we asked this year’s filmmakers to connect with us so we can engage them more on program topics that we identify as a benefit to our community. For example, one program that we’re currently developing is a free script writing course to promote adult literacy. Or, working on a filmmaking Bootcamp for injured veterans.
These are programs that we want to someday achieve, and without the input from filmmakers, we can’t become who we want to be when we hit those pre-teens of an organization.
FILMMAKERS
This week we will highlight filmmakers who either had showcased a film in our first film festival, or will have shown a film at both festivals. This is to ultimately answer the question, what makes a filmmaker tick. Why do they do it? What satisfaction do they get from it?
We are scheduled to feature Radheya Jegatheva, Mark A. C. Brown and Michael Smith. Though, Mark Brown will be featured most likely next week due to my fault basically. I assigned a writer in San Diego to contact Mr. Brown, who lives in the UK. The time zone differences were made connecting very difficult.
TICKETS AND PASSES
You can buy tickets and passes now to our film festival, here.
