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The Disappearing Middle of Independent Film: A Cautionary Tale
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 south of Tulsa and a twelve hour drive from Chicago. The inside of my room looked like the inside of any other budget chain hotel room. From the window I could see the road and a Taco Bell. The festival where my senior capstone film was going to play was a five minute drive down the highway. It was billed as an “international film festival”. My film, Octoberland, was an eighty-five minute no-budget horror anthology film in the vein of Creepshow or Trick ‘r’ Treat. No-budget, here, does not mean “$750,000 and starring Ethan Hawke,” but rather, “like $45 for pasta and pizza to feed my friends who helped me make it”. And it shows. It’s not a great film by any measure, and if the dozens of people who have left comments on Youtube are to be believed, it’s not even a good film. They’re probably right. I was twenty- two and still in film school at a small liberal arts college in Ohio with no money and a DSLR. I’m still sort of proud of it though. It’s kind of an achievement to make a coherent…
