CONSUMER MARKET
With its Independent Film Week, the IFP Market reaches out.
BY ANTHONY KAUFMAN
Every week is independent film week in New York City, what with the bountiful number of specialized pictures and micro-releases nestled into theaters along with the dozens of ongoing film festivals every month. But from Sept. 19 to Sept. 23 it became official: the Independent Feature Project launched its first annual Independent Film Week, a combined public and industry affair aimed at raising awareness for and galvanizing the production of indie film.
On the public side, the IFP held free events such as conversations with actors Matthew Modine and Glenn Close and directors Norman Jewison and Rodrigo Garcia (Nine Lives, the week’s gala opener) and a staged screenplay reading. Also, in cooperation with nine arthouses citywide (notable absence: Sunshine Cinemas), it organized a promotion that provided free popcorn and soda to moviegoers at independent films. On the industry side, the perennial IFP Market, now in its 27th year, took place with an increased focus on meetings and mentorship. “We don’t have any desire to turn the market into a festival,” says the IFP’s executive director, Michelle Byrd, “but we wondered if we could do something that targets the consumer.”
Local exhibitors were happy to take part in this year’s public events, many of which were quickly organized just a month in advance, but they see these initiatives more as building blocks for future editions. “There was some awareness,” admits the IFC Center’s John Vanco, “but you have to crawl before you can run.” The Pioneer Theater’s Ray Privett agrees: “These things rarely start out gigantic.”
Over at the Angelika Film Center, 95 documentaries in varying stages of production and 25 short films premiered at the market in the hopes of finding completion funds and/ or distribution. But it was the seventh floor of the Puck Building, at the video library, where one regularly saw reps from HBO, PBS and distributors like Magnolia Pictures and Samuel Goldwyn Films combing through cassettes and DVD sample reels.
Some of the most talked-about works-in-progress included Marlo Poras’s The Candidate, winner of a prize worth $31,500 in goods and services, about a 94-yearold woman who runs for the U.S. Senate in New Hampshire; Marco Ricci’s Gone to Texas: The Lives of Forrest Carter, about the best-selling Cherokee author of The Outlaw Josey Wales who was actually a KKK member; Loren Mendell and Tiller Russell’s baseballin-prison chronicle Bad Boys of Summer; Jeremy and Randy Stulberg’s Off the Grid: Life on the Mesa, about radicals living off the land in Arizona; and Joel Katz’s intriguing examination of race White: A Study in Color.
Completed docs incited less buzz. Heather Lyn MacDonald, director of the 1995 Sundance audience winner Ballot Measure 9, blames the competition from the work-inprogress selections, which buyers are seeing at an earlier stage of the production cycle. At the market this year with her feature doc Been Rich All My Life, a portrait of elderly black dancers, MacDonald says, “If I know what I know now, I would’ve brought it as a work-in-progress.”
Erica Soehngen, co-director with Robert Palumbo of the in-the-works Terrorist George, found the market to be especially helpful in pushing their project forward. “We have a number of requests to see more material, so our work is cut out for us,” she says. “It was a great motivator — it forced us to sit down and really think about the project.”
Rather than funnel mediocre projects into the media landscape, the IFP seems more intent than ever on bettering projects before they enter the world. For the first time, the IFP-initiated a Rough Cuts Lab, which took place Sept 15-17. The Lab brought together eight filmmakers with films at the rough-cut stage and, shielding their identities from the buyers who would gather days later at the Puck Building, sent them through an intensive three-day workshop in which industry advisers counseled them on locking picture (editor Alan Oxman), music licensing (music supervisor Tracy McKnight and BMI’s Doreen Ringer-Ross), scoring (composer George S. Clinton), delivery (post supervisor and delivery consultant Rob Lyons), marketing and publicity (publicist and marketing consultant Reid Rosefelt) and sales (the Film Sales Company’s Andrew Herwitz). (Disclosure: the event was headed by producer and Filmmaker editor Scott Macaulay.)
“It’s about strengthening the community,” says Byrd of the overall event. “At most events, filmmakers are in adversarial position, but we’re pretty proactive about saying that the people [we gather] around the room are the ones who are going to help you.”
Also in the New York Scene: TAXING DECISIONS: New York’s independent film community learns to love the state and city’s new refundable tax credits.
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