The Disappearing Middle of Independent Film: A Cautionary Tale

Photo by Karen Zhao on Unsplash

Oklahoma is a strange place for a film festival. There’s twenty-seven of them there at the time of this writing. Turns out there are no criteria that have to be met beyond “wanting to start a film festival”. And so people just… start film festivals. Kind of bizarre, really.

I was staying in McAlester, an interstate rest stop of a town an hour and a half…