Jeff Morris isn’t a novice when it comes to film festivals: the LA-based writer, producer, and director has participated in around 20 of them since completing his first feature, You Did What?, last year. That’s enough experience to give him some perspective on Chicago’s fourth annual Indiefest, held at the Village Theatre at North and Clark and the Seneca Hotel earlier this month. “I can speak candidly, because I’ve already sold my movie,” he says. “It was far and away the worst festival I’ve ever attended.” He’s not alone in that opinion: Seattle filmmaker Drew Emery, who says he “tried to find a silver lining” during the five days he spent in Chicago with his marriage documentary, Inlaws and Outlaws, calls Indiefest a “soul-sucking disaster” that ought to have a “wooden stake driven through its heart.”
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Indiefest, “created by independent filmmakers for independent filmmakers” to “give your project as much exposure as possible,” promised its 2006 festival would “showcase the best in independent film to the general public, filmmakers, the media, and to distribution executives.” The entry fee for features was between $70 and $120, and though Morris says that’s relatively high–more expensive than Sundance–he thought it would be worth the money. The festival seemed like a good match for his film, a mainstream romantic comedy, and offered not only four separate screenings but a grand prize worth $300,000 in goods and services from industry sponsors including Resolution Digital Studios, Bexel Video Production, and Zacuto Rentals.
Indiefest director Lee Alan blames some of those problems on the condition of the Village. “It’s old,” he says. “They don’t have the greatest sound system. And when we’re showing approximately 20 films on each screen every day, we have to set the projection and sound to a happy medium. Everyone’s got different aspect ratios, different formats. It’s not going to be optimal for each film; we can’t keep adjusting it.” But Jay Bliznick, who headed Village management during the festival, says the video projection equipment was brought in by Indiefest. “We were only contracted to provide 35-millimeter equipment,” he says, “and they had very few 35-millimeter films. Everything else was projection equipment they brought in and tried to set up themselves. They didn’t do an accurate job of looking at our sound system–which was fine for 35-millimeter–to see what equipment they would have needed to patch in.” And Emery says the problems weren’t limited to the theater. When a DVD of his film was screened in a conference room at the Seneca, the equipment was set to an aspect ratio of 16:9, even though his film was shot in 4:3. He asked the volunteer in charge to make the change–a simple menu command involving a few clicks of a remote control–or allow him to make it. The answer was no way. When Emery threatened to take his DVD and walk rather than suffer through 100 minutes of distorted viewing, the volunteer had to get Alan on the phone to OK the switch.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): photo/Nadia Dee Tanaka.
