Micro-Festival Grant Winners. Round #2

Our micro-festival grant is still very much in effect! We read proposals for events ranging from DIY animation festivals to drive-in cinemas, hosted in locales from Seoul, South Korea to Houston, Texas. While all these ideas are still in the running for our next grant, we’ve decided on our winner for this quarter:

PubX! Otie Wheeler’s pitch for “a DIY pop-up film festival for Western Mass” truly captures the core ethos of Simple Machine in general and this grant series in particular. The post both begins and ends with lyrics by the Desperate Bicycles: “It was easy, it was cheap, go and do it!” Perhaps we should make this our new theme song, because, honestly, we really believe this.

PubX seeks to support under-seen films (“created outside the barriers of industries and institutions”) by staging a “semi-annual, randomly recurring pop-up film festival and cinematheque.” We love that Otie doesn’t worry about making his event excessively formal or elaborate or glitzy or bureaucratic or unchanging. He doesn’t worry about establishing his series with the rigid structure of a regular time and place. He wants to provide exposure and context to under-recognized films, and he’ll get it done whenever and however he can.

This is exactly what we want to encourage. Don’t be daunted by the seemingly Herculean task of establishing a fancy, polished, regularly scheduled, wildly popular event series out of thin air. Start with one cheap, easy, manageable event. When you have the time and energy, put together a second event, then a third. What you need to do is pick a vaguely memorable name and keep showing good movies. Everything else is optional.

Once again, as we celebrate the successful conclusion of this second round of grants, we eagerly await your new ideas for cheap, easy micro-festivals. Questions may be directed to grant@smplmchn.com, while pitches must be submitted to our Medium collection for consideration.

(Header image by Otie.)