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Going Up: Knoxville’s Elev8or Pitch Competition
Catacombs With submissions currently open for the 2025 Elev8tor Pitch Competition at FILM FEST KNOX (deadline July 9!), we’re unpaywalling Scott Macaulay’s article on the program from Filmmaker’s Summer, 2025 print edition. — Editor
There’s a familiar ritual when you arrive at a film festival: check into your hotel, AirbnB or friend’s couch, pick up your lanyard and head to the opening night event. Most often, that event is an out-of-competition, relentlessly inoffensive opening night film provided by a sponsor that stimulates polite but limited conversation at the afterparty.
I’ve participated in that ritual so many times that I was pleasantly surprised by what was on offer the first night at last November’s FILM FEST KNOX. There were multiple events, with the central one the screening of not one film but eight. At the festival’s downtown Regal Cinema hub, the shorts, all eight-minute-long proof-of-concepts for feature films, played to a packed house who cheered the local makers. The films were culled from a group of 21 short film proposals, with the advancing filmmakers given two months to actually make the films and rehearse accompanying one-minute pitches.
There was tremendous variety on screen that night, although certain themes—such as mid-life dreams and aspirations— reappeared. Two of my favorites were gritty genre entries. Edy Recendez’s Outlaws is an adrenalized fusion of Peckinpah and basement horror about murderous politicians, and Melanie Lund’s To Hell With It, a strikingly shot and production designed revenge drama, has elements of L.A.’s Grim Sleeper serial killer story by way of Michael Haneke’s Caché.
Three nights later in the same theater, the festival awarded $18,000 in prizes to four winning Elev8tor Pitch filmmaking teams and, even more important, enrolled them in the festival’s development lab, led by filmmaker (Something, Anything and Light from Light) and 25 New Face of Independent Film Paul Harrill. In a recent conversation, Harrill told me more about the program’s genesis, explaining that FILM FEST KNOX’s predecessor festival, the Knoxville Film Festival, had “embraced the concept of timed film competitions. But I think we all shared the feeling that those competitions don’t necessarily show off the full talents of the filmmakers because of the rules, and very compressed time, involved. We thought that if we could create something that encouraged more ambition, people in the community would actually embrace that and really get excited about it.”
FILM FEST KNOX is hosted by Visit Knoxville and the Visit Knoxville Film Office, in partnership with Regal Cinema and the Public Cinema. Curt Willis, senior director of the Visit Knoxville Film Office, says that as far as their motivation to help support the festival, now entering its third year, as well as the pitch program, “One of our angles from the Film Office perspective is that [the festival] is going to generate business. President Kim Bumpas, [myself] and the team are getting really talented producers with their great films in town, and I have them as a captive audience to pitch what we have here. And [the Elev8or Pitch] is just another angle—it’s about developing what’s already here in the region and
starting that engine of feature films made by local and regional people.”
Harrill is a veteran of the old IFP Narrative lab and has worked with producers who have been part of the Sundance Producing Lab. He’s also followed lab initiatives at places like the New Orleans Film Festival to craft a program made for Knoxville. Elev8tor Pitch launched at FILM FEST KNOX’s inaugural 2023 edition, and “nobody had a feature script,” Harrill remembers. “Maybe one project had a treatment. So, one of the refinements for the 2024 edition was that if you make it to the top eight, you have to submit a treatment.” Over the next four to five months, the winning filmmakers write a first draft guided by feedback from producing and screenwriting mentors.
But mentorship can take other forms, including advice and conversation around more holistic goals “that are more tailored to the person, their ambitions and their situation—where it’s less of a lab and bit more individualized,” says Harrill. He also cites the “community-building” aspect of gathering filmmakers in a room with seasoned mentors and sharing, under “a cone of silence,” the kinds of real-life industry details that are “rare to encounter” outside intimate spaces.
Chad Cunningham was a winner in Elev8or Pitch’s first year, and he’s been working in the Lab on a prison-themed horror film based on his eight-minute short, Catacombs. Set during one night in what turns out to be a haunted prison, it’s a tremendously impressive work, with beautifully lit wide shots of the prison amid thunder and lightning, macabre set-ups with ghostly prisoners and security-screen footage captured in-camera. As Cunningham explains, he had been sitting on the idea since 2019, inspired by a newspaper story of a deadly prison riot, “unsure of how to make it. I’m funding it out of my own pocket, and it’s got prisoners and a prison set—how do you come up with that? But when Curt asked me to do the Elev8or Pitch, I was like, ‘OK, I’ll take a swing at that.’”
Drawing upon his professional background directing TV true crime recreations, Cunningham secured access to a jail that has a closed-off section sometimes rented out to film crews. All prison cell and hallway interiors, as well as VFX plates, were shot in one day, with wide exteriors lensed at another jail, the Brushy Mountain State Penitentiary. After prepping the VFX, Cunningham and his crew went back for three more days. There might have been an easier way to do it, he says, “but I like shooting monitors practically, so I had to structure our shoot around getting that footage, having time to treat that footage and do the VFX, then come back.”
Far more than a demo, Catacombs has played many genre festivals, including Screamfest, Panic Fest and FilmQuest. Along with the Elev8or Pitch mentors, Cunningham has been working with co-writer Ethan Taylor on the feature screenplay, “building out the lore of the prison” and working out an important backstory for the protagonist: “We’re working on a few final notes that will punch the script up, so after a couple of rewrites, we’ll try to get cast attached and take that package to production.”
Of course, the Elev8or Pitch organizers and the Knoxville Film Commission hope that the film, when it’s made, will be shot locally, not just because of the production funds spent in the community but so that it can be part of the larger infrastructure FILM FEST KNOX hopes to build. “A cultural investment becomes an economic investment,” says Harrill, “by creating a culture where people feel like they’re part of a community that can sustain them and provide a home for their artistic ambitions.”
