Underground Films Enjoy Exposure at Festival

Cleveland Celebrates Lesser Known Directors

Welcome Exposure: The Ohio Independant Film Festival brings local indie film to Cleveland. (photo courtesy Ohiofilms.com)

Anyone interested in film and filmmaking should take advantage of the Ohio Independent Film Festival, running Nov. 6 through 12. The event is one of Ohio's best venues for local and regional films and is the closest thing to a film school in Cleveland, offering panels and workshops hosted by local cinematographers. The festival also culminates a year long script-writing contest, presenting this year's choices from over a hundred screenplays.

Starting out in 1994 as the "Off-Hollywood Film Fest," local co-founders and directors Annetta Marion and Bernadette Gillota screened everything from 16 mm to high-8 to video in a dingy little bar storefront. Though the festival maintains its gritty, non-corporate aura and dedication to presenting the work of area filmmakers, it has garnered a national reputation and funding from a variety of sources.

Marion and Gillota have held about thirteen festivals since they decided to start organizing the event. The two met at a pro-choice rally and later became board members of the National Abortion Rights Action League. Having no experience in filmmaking, they decided to make a documentary about being pro-choice and were quickly drawn into several other film projects. Disappointed that there weren't any real opportunities to show their films, they decided to organize what has become the Ohio Independent Film Festival.

Since her NARAL documentaries, Gillota has had a variety of experience working in film and was production manager for two big-budget Hollywood movies shot in Cleveland, Telling Lies in America (1996) and Counterforce (1997). Marion has worked as a line producer for several independent features, including the award-winning Ohio indie film Dream Catcher. The two are currently working on Nightowls of Coventry, written and produced by Clevelander Laura Paglin.

True to their roots as DIY filmmakers, the OIFF is made for the kind of non-Hollywood, low-budget enterprises that don't get much screen time. Some of the films come out of large-scale festivals like Sundance or Telluride but many are the pet projects of impassioned but financially strapped film buffs. There's everything from films about beauty pageants and love triangles to those by seasoned indie filmmakers about addicts and womanizers to those by anonymous directors that explore the world of excrement.

"You take a chance on what you're going to see," explains Cleveland filmmaker Robert Banks, a panelist at this year's festival. Banks, who has shown work here in Oberlin and is featured in Cleveland's Free Times this week, is a veteren OIFF participant. Calling the festival an opportunity to "inform the public about what's going on," Banks says that regardless of format, if a film is worthy of getting shown, the OIFF will show it.

"It's open and liberal," Banks said.

The event starts this Sunday with a party and free lighting workshop, featuring five area filmmakers, who will show how a film is made by setting up, lighting and shooting a raw script in under two hours. On Tuesday, ScriptMill features a staged reading of one of the two winning screenplays from the OIFF writing contest. The festival continues through the week, hosting several films by and about Ohioans, including a premier of the PBS documentary Conscience and Constiution, about organized resistance to WWII Japanese internment camps in the U.S.

Other films include Once by Lyn Elliot, a parable about female rage, Ordinary Madnesss by Michael Paukst in which an inspirational and profound journey is made to the gravesite of Jack Kerouac and Sheldon Gleisser's Xada: Jewish American Warrior Princess. Many of the films are free and followed by panel discussions as well as other miscellaneous films and shorts. The festival will climax next weekend with a two-day film school focusing on Assistant Direction. Wrapping it up will be an "All-Ohio Day" and a program of experimental shorts.

Most events will take place at the Cleveland Public Theater (6415 Detroit Avenue) For a complete schedule and ticket information, visit www.Ohiofilms.com.