This year’s Charlotte Film Festival offered a variety of films for everyone
The Charlotte Film Festival is an event that is held yearly to showcase the best in upcoming cinema for the remainder of 2019. The festival has been held since 2006, and this year it was held at the Ayrsley Grand Cinema 14. This year, the eleventh iteration of the festival showed a total of 88 different films between September 25 and September 29. The films that were presented were a mixture of short narrative films, feature-length narratives, short documentaries, and feature-length documentaries.
This year’s festival handed out seven awards to seven different films. Those awards were the Audience Award, Best Student Film, Best Narrative Feature, Best Documentary Feature, Best Documentary Short, Best Narrative Short, and the Social Justice award. The films within the “Best” categories went up against cinema in their respective blocks. The most significant prize of the festival is the Audience Award. This year, the Audience Award went to Limbo, a narrative feature directed by Pat Dortch. The synopsis for the film from the festival’s website states: “1600 years after his birth, Tearlach O’Rian works to save souls from hell while battling his own demons.”
The winners of the other awards are as follows:
· Best Student Film — Alone
· Best Narrative Feature — Book Week
· Best Documentary Feature — Float
· Best Documentary Short — Murder in Mobile
· Social Justice Award — My Grandson, Charlotte
· Best Narrative Short — Pozole
The Films of the Festival
This festival has ten different blocks dedicated to short films. Six of those blocks are devoted to narrative short films, three of them dedicated to documentary short films, and one block dedicated to student short films. Each block hosts a variety of films from a variety of different directors from around the world. The countries that were represented in these short film blocks are China, Austria, the United Kingdom, Poland, and Romania. After the films in these blocks screened, a Q&A session occurred. These sessions included some of the filmmakers in attendance at the festival. During these sessions, filmmakers discussed how they came up with the ideas for their films, the production process, and their goals for the future.
A wide range of feature films and special presentations were featured at the festival this year. Some of the special presentations were older films such as Tammy and the T-Rex. Awards contenders such as Bong Joon-ho’s Parasite and Céline Sciamma’s Portrait of a Lady on Fire were shown at the festival as special presentations as well. Parasite and Portrait played at much larger festivals this year, such as the Cannes Film Festival and the Toronto International Film Festival. Other features that played in competition at the festival were from local filmmakers, like Among Mountain Crags, a film shot in parts of North Carolina and other areas among the Appalachian Mountains.
The People Behind the Festival
There will not have been a festival if people do not know about one. Brandon Falls is the Communications and Marketing Director for the festival. He has been involved on and off with the Charlotte Film Festival since 2009. In his role, Falls reaches out to filmmakers to get promotional material, manages the festival’s Instagram and Twitter accounts, and assists with the festival materials such as the poster and the program guide. With Charlotte being a smaller festival, Falls believes that the festival is a great starting point for filmmakers who want to take their film to other places. Falls explains, “For a local Charlotte filmmaker that might not have the opportunity to play a film festival on the West Coast just right away, if they start saying ‘I played in Charlotte’ or if you were lucky enough to win Audience Choice award or [other awards]. They can put those laurels on their poster, or they can put it on their profile, that gives them more prestige. They can go to other film festivals, and it gives them a chance to get out there and get to see other people.”
Filmmakers at this year’s festival use the festival as a place to show what they have been working on for the last year or so. Rodney Stringfellow, the director of the short film Manhood, explained that the process for submitting the film to this festival was easier than it may seem to be. “After [Manhood] was completed, I registered it on Film Freeway. Once you’ve given all of your information, you then decide which festivals you need to enter into.” Film Freeway is a distribution website that allows filmmakers to submit their films to various film festivals across the country. As for the benefits that the festival could bring to a local filmmaker, Stringfellow says, “[Submitting to a festival] does a lot in terms of creating a platform for local filmmakers to be seen alongside national and international filmmakers.” Stringfellow goes on to exclaim, “I found Charlotte to be an incredible place for filmmakers. The filmmaking community is amazing, and they create work not because they’re trying to position themselves. They’re doing work because they’re artists.”
The first Charlotte Film Festival was created in 2006, and it was intended to give newer filmmakers a place to showcase their work to their peers in the Charlotte area. In 2014, the festival was consumed by the non-profit organization, Charlotte Cinema Arts. Since then, the organization has held the festival yearly in September. While the event originally started as a weekend event, it has since gone on to become an event that lasts a week. Some of the most notable films at the Charlotte Film Festival have been Tourments d’amour (Torments of Love), Papagajka, and What Lies Within.
The Charlotte Film Festival has acted as an outlet for many independent filmmakers from around the country to show their work to the Charlotte audience. The winners of the festival awards even have a more significant opportunity to show their films to an even wider audience. Along with smaller films that play each year, there are an array of larger (non-blockbuster) films that play at the festival. To find out more about the Charlotte Film Festival, visit their website.
