Film festivals of all sizes came together with art-house exhibitors, distributors and filmmakers in mid-January for the FilmEx conference, a five-day virtual conference in January that took the place of Arthouse Convergence’s annual pre-Sundance meeting in Utah. Few are the filmmakers that have not found themselves on a Facebook debate thread at some point with other filmmakers decrying sham film festivals that took their submission fee money and then did not deliver on the most basic expectations. Well, the film festivals, film societies and arthouse theaters that participated in the past Art House Convergence conferences and now this year’s FilmEx […]
by Melanie Addington on Mar 4, 2021Saturday night at the 16th annual Oxford Film Festival was prom—not an actual prom, but a sweet sixteen-themed awards ceremony complete with fried chicken and sangria, hosts in ballgowns and an electricity in the air where you felt the nostalgia of your own teenage dance. If you grew up in the south, like I did, your prom may not have felt anywhere as progressive as this one, and it wasn’t until I was standing in the packed auditorium of the awards that I realized I had mostly seen LGBTQ, minority-focused and movies with a female gaze at the festival, which […]
by Meredith Alloway on Mar 18, 2019