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Like so many other annual events, this year’s Milwaukee Short Film Festival, scheduled for September at the Fox-Bay Cinema, was canceled and then reimagined virtually. The event Moviemaker magazine once named as “Best Local Festival” is back Sept. 11-12 and streaming with a program culled from the “best of” previous years. MSFF’s director Ross Bigley answers questions about his 2020 event.
Some movie theaters around the country have introduced protocols and distanced seating in order to reopen. Did you consider this for the MSFF? Does Fox-Bay remain entirely closed?
Back in May when we announced that we would do a virtual “Best Of” edition for the festival, we did look at the various options, and situations that may occur, such as being back in a theater if they do reopen. And, the Fox Bay has reopened with social distancing. But the thing is, way back in late April as we were going through those options, what we decided then we had to stick with it. I felt this COVID situation wasn’t something that you could say for certainty that you could be at some venue in September. You just couldn’t. There are theaters open, but there are many, many theaters still closed.
Back then you didn’t know, now you can see some safety measures are working—Wearing a mask and being six feet apart. And we can now see that this will be this way for some time to come. So much so that we are looking at various ways we can do a festival in September 2021.Will it be a mix of virtual and in person? Maybe. America hasn’t been as successful as other countries in fighting COVID. And we might not until we get serious about it. We haven’t flattened the curve.
How about trying to do a two-night drive-in theater version—any merit to that idea?
That idea was brought up, but we were in a situation that made us do what had to do. We are well known outside of Wisconsin, and this way, a virtual event, gives us a chance to be seen outside of Milwaukee for the first time. Those that heard of us can finally check us out. For many years we’ve been told that we have the strongest line up of films in the state, now you can see it, and it is free to all. And, there were also economic factors at play. The festival had begun taking submissions last August. Our early bird period is our longest in the submission process, but our biggest and busiest submission time is always our Regular Deadline phase. We get hundreds of films then. That’s when COVID hit. And from late February to June we only got a handful of films. On top of that, our sponsors were hit as well. We were left with this option.
Are you saying in your press release that this year’s lineup is a “best-of” compilation from the past five years? If so, why not go with film submissions for 2020? I assume you already received many submissions by early summer when you decided to postpone the event.
We did, and postponing wasn’t something we wanted to do. Back in early May we said it would be a virtual “Best Of.” We felt that the best thing to do was move the regular deadline into next year, and all submissions so far would be held for season 23. We do look at films throughout the process and some films were already accepted. Those will be held for next season, we talked with those filmmakers about our situation and they understood. I felt we needed more to program. Not saying what we had in so far wasn’t good, but to get a fuller idea of programming we needed more films. We program films to complement other films. We have good films submitted, but to do a really good job of programming it has to be with more films submitted.
We could possibly have an in-person event next year, and that is the more ideal way of seeing films in my opinion. Many festivals are still navigating how to proceed in this pandemic, we’ve talked to some filmmakers about other options as well, a retrospective of their work perhaps. Smaller events in the lead up to next year. And we are partnering with The Shame List Picture Show with Michael Viers doing interviews of featured festival filmmakers, so we got ideas and things to entertain you with as we hope things return to some form of normal next year.
And in the meantime, we have the best of the best of the last five years. If you haven’t caught us yet now is the chance. Great local filmmaking with Black Lives Matter by Rosella Joseph, Aaron Johnson’s Hoan Alone, strong international films like Tibo Pinsard’s Gorilla and Tom Marshall’s dark_net. And amazing films from around the country like Alison Becker and Kimmy Gatewood’s Control, and Lynda Reiss’ Ready to Go. Looking back is interesting, we’ve built relationships with filmmakers and many came to aid us this year. A lot of these filmmakers have gone on to very successful careers, and we are thankful that they wanted their films seen again.
We worked with past filmmakers to select a lineup that reflects the best films of the last five years, including our Voices Heard program, still the only program in the city that puts the spotlight on local filmmakers of color. Twenty-one films will be broken into two programs. The first will go live on our website 5 p.m, Sept. 11, and the second goes live on our website at 5 p.m., Sept. 12. The programs will be taken down on Sunday night. So, if you ever missed one of our festivals here's your chance to see what we've programmed, and again, it's all free! Plus, we'll also have info on our sponsors during the event so you can support them during this pandemic, for without them we wouldn't be here.
For more information on the films themselves please go to MilwaukeeIndependentFilmSociety.org and click on each title.
To read more articles from our film section, click here.
To read more articles by David Luhrssen, click here.
