Friday, Nov. 27, 2009

76 independent films to play over 5 days

Jerry Dalton can't wait for Christmastime so he can play Santa Claus with the silver screen.

The fifth annual Myrtle Beach International Film Festival, of which Dalton is founder and director, begins Tuesday. Seventy-six independent films spread over five days - from shorts and cartoons to documentaries and features - will play the Carmike Cinemas' Broadway 16 in Myrtle Beach.

The owner of Dalton Pictures and Entertainment Co. in Myrtle Beach books the festival for the first week every December. Dalton is especially excited about the 2009 edition because it represents the highest compilation of submissions to date. He marketed the event at the Cannes Film Festival in France in May and added another channel through which filmmakers could apply to show at the Myrtle Beach festival.

Dalton sees distribution as the biggest hurdle for independent moviemakers to clear, so such local film festivals play a critical role in marketing their art form.

"We've gotten great features this year," he said. "This year, the music videos are out of this world. This seems to be the year of the music video."

Three films include South Carolina connections: "Circle Unbroken," a short about sweetgrass basketmaking that plays Tuesday; "All for Liberty," an early-1700s epic, on Dec. 5; and another short, "Little Devil," on Dec. 5, covering Lee Atwater, the late Republican party operative, who grew up in Aiken.

With many more submissions than capacity, Dalton likes to ensure a showcase of all types of films, which besides a diverse American mix, goes global in many ways.

"We are a melting pot," he said. "We kind of represent a lot of cultures here."

One work playing Thursday originated in Iraq: "Jalebi," about a man and his camel.

The U.S. market, Dalton said, serves as kind of a litmus test, the standard of moviemaking, but film festivals across the world show each nationality's niche in the field.

"Each one of them has their style," he said. "The Chinese make great narrative films. The French seem to be good at character development. The British are very good at comedy and dramas. The Germans are really technical filmmakers. The Philippines and other Asiatic countries are very good at documentaries."

Dalton voiced his fanfare for Japanese horrors such as "Hotel Chelsea," which runs Dec. 4 and was filmed in New York.

"They don't use a whole lot of gore," he said of Japanese films. "It's more psychological, which actually is harder to do than just throwing blood all over the screen."

Scripting personality

Films also mirror the people who make them, if not autobiographically, then at least some element that shapes their personality.

Kathi Casey wrote, produced and directed "Worth," a seven-minute short about a violin's placement in an auction. It opens the festival on Tuesday.

By phone last week from Los Angeles, Casey said shooting her work took only one day, but she and a small crew undertook about 80 setups for filming.

"It was destined to be made, but not intended to be made," she said, remembering how her acting work had ground to a halt during a guild strike in Hollywood.

Casey said this marks her second film and hooking up with the film's director of photography and an aspiring film producer sow networking for future endeavors.

Finding the festivals where her films have the right fit presents another mammoth step in marketing, so an independent filmmaker needs to take rejection in stride.

"You tend to take it personally," she said. "You tend to start thinking it's all about you, that you didn't do something right, or it's not your best performance or they didn't like you. Once you step on to the other of the gate, that all goes away."

Casey said festival organizers mix and match based on what each local audience looks to see, and that each crowd has a certain taste.

"You refine your radar," she said, "because it makes you commit to ones more likely to like your film."

Casey said her parents had dreams of her growing into a concert pianist since her recital days at ages 6 and 7 in the San Francisco Bay area, and she met her husband, a singer in a band.

"I still do love music," she said, noting how her artistic flair translated from a musical instrument, something heard, to an image captured by the camera, something seen.

Real-life inspiration

Emmett Loverde's short, "The Truth About Me," opens the second day of the festival in Myrtle Beach. He said he first heard of the festival through an article in MovieMaker magazine.

On the telephone Sunday from Los Angeles, Loverde said the 1999 Columbine massacre in Colorado inspired him to write this play he turned into a film.

"This was partially due to someone being jealous," said Loverde, a big-brother mentor in his community and former schoolteacher who felt saddened and moved in reading about the incident and looking at photos of students.

"I answered it in the way I do these things. I wrote a comedy about a boy, a high school kid who was trying to embarrass the most popular girl in the school."

The male character, Loverde said, would pose some interview questions to the girl to undercut her intelligence. But she surmises the boy's scheme.

"It becomes kind of a chess match," Loverde said. "Halfway through, they find each other really interesting."

That underscores Loverde's message.

"Talk with each other," he said. "You might find more in common than you think."

Loverde said things have changed since he took a filmmaking class in high school and had to use razors to splice tape.

"I learned how to edit film on film," he said, remembering how he graduated to editing productions between two VHS videocassette recorders, before home-based editing took off in the 1990s.

He laughed, recalling how he later bought a camera for $2,000 that could shoot in high definition.

"When I was a little boy," he said, "you couldn't buy a camera that could shoot a movie-theater-type film for less than $100,000."