Standing Rock Cultural Arts executive director Jeff Ingram pauses for a moment, allowing the words “eight months” to sink in and drift away. Then he repeats them. “Eight months.”
Ingram is describing the timeline Argentinean expat (via Spain) filmmaker Lucas Figueroa used to create and edit the opening montage in Una Trilogia de Muerte – “The Death Trilogy” – featured in the Kent arts collective’s international short film festival this Saturday, January 30 at 8PM at the Kent Stage.
“The opening is all digitally rendered with the use of borrowed friends’ computers,” says Ingram. “With some layering of composites in filmmaking, you can set the computer to execute your effects while you go eat your lunch or whatever. His sequence literally took eight months to do.”
To hear Ingram tell it, the sequence is emblematic of the tireless work and unbridled passion that exists within all the featured filmmakers. It’s the very reason he and Standing Rock Film Festival Director/filmmaker
Mike Hovancek have featured cinematic works at Standing Rock annually for the past seven years. “Mike and I had been going to the Ohio Independent Film Festival,” Ingram says. “We began considering the possibilities to showcase filmmakers we knew here in Kent; but whatever we decided to do, it needed to fit a niche that wasn’t quite filled yet.”
“I found myself complaining that there wasn’t a film festival in Kent,” agrees Hovancek. “I decided that it was useless to complain... I should either start a film festival or shut my mouth. I had been putting on events through Standing Rock at the time, so I contacted [Ingram] and proposed a format and an approach for a film festival.
“We didn’t want to compete with Ohio Indie, the Cleveland International Film Festival or the other events out there,” adds Ingram. “We decided appealing to people’s increasingly short attention spans with short films was probably the best format to pursue.”
It wasn’t long before submissions began pouring in from far outside Portage County. This year’s works come from directors as nearby as “exotic Kent, Ohio,” New Jersey and Canada, and as far away as France,Israel and India. “With more people having access to cameras, video editing and computers, and websites like YouTube, there’s really been an explosion of short video out there," says Ingram. "It’s very enjoyable to see how [filmmaking] has grown with technology.”
The format has become incredibly varied, too, as the submissions come from across the globe. "The contrast between film, which is still a lot more expensive as a medium, and video is neat to see, and very much a part of our drawing attention to films that push the envelope," says Ingram. "This is definitely not your standard Hollywood fare.”
This year’s Standing Rock Film Festival is presented in three parts: Short films from around the world, including comedy shorts, animation, documentaries and music video; Figueroa’s trilogy, chosen as last year’s People’s Choice Award Winner; and the silent films of Hovancsek and fellow director Cindy Penter, accompanied live by guitarist Brad Bolton. The varied selection rounds out an evening that Ingram and Hovancek promise is full of surprises.
In a way, the festival is a celebration of how accessible modern filmmaking is to aspiring creatives that once would have gone unheard of. “Most of the wonderful films we are seeing today would have been nearly impossible to create or share a decade ago,” says Hovancek. “Some established independent filmmakers [were once] celebrated simply for making films, even if the quality was a bit shaky. Today, it is amazing to see the high quality of many of the independent films people are making.”
Even the selection process was an adventure for the organizers. “This year’s film festival has a selection that really caught me off guard," says Ingram. "We actually screened one of the accepted submissions a second time during the selection process, which is really rare.” As a tease, he declines to name the film, but promises a profound effect on viewers. “It’s about a genuinely dark subject, but the film was created in such a beautiful way that it really dug in under my skin. You know that sensation, when you’re walking around days, weeks, after watching a film and the subject keeps coming back to you? When we get that feeling, we know we’ve really tapped into something.”
Standing Rock Film Festival at The Kent Stage, 175 E. Main St., Kent. Ticketing, schedule and details can be found at www.kentstage.org and www.standingrock.net
