Before we get into some amazing things for the new year (2018) I'd like to go back to the year where it all started in 2016 - the first year of our festival. 2016 was a good year for us as it was the first time stepping from behind the shadow of our previous festival Gwinnett Center International Film Festival (2013-2015), which focused on mainstream and non-genre films, and into the wide world of genre independent film making!
I decided that if I wanted to continue being a part of the film festival culture that I needed to take a step back and re-evaluate what I wanted to do as a film festival entity. I knew I wanted to have a more focused group of films that appealed to a specific audience hence our focus on animation, fantasy, horror, and science fiction films.
Although small, our first year had a huge variety of films for our audience such as the Halloween and monster filled feature All Hallow's Evil: Lord of the Harvest (Director's Cut), which opened
the festival and was written & directed by Ron McLellen! We were also lucky enough to screen the horror features The Hike and Bigfoot: The Curse of Blood Mountain (from Georgia native Chris Simoes), among many others. Some of my favorite features were the zombie film Peelers and the fantasy The Village of Middlevale.
On the shorts front we screened a huge variety of films (way to many to name here) but some of my favorites were Bubble, Earworm, Little Boy Blue, Awakenings, Mr. Dentonn, Legend of the Dark Rider and the web series Clown Versus Monkey (from Georgia native Sam Drog). There were just so many films to choose from in such a short amount of time to watch them all. I was lucky enough to have seen all the films screened but a truly remarkable aspect of the first year was the amount of filmmakers that came out in support of their films and indie film making in general.
We also had many special guests at the event including Sonya Thompson and Larry Mainland of AMC's The Walking Dead in addition to actress Lynn McArthur! This was just a great first year to celebrate everything indie film!
On Sunday, to end the weekend off with a bang we had our Awards Ceremony in which we gave out awards to the best of the best indie films screened during the weekend. This included our regular Festival Awards but also our Festival Director's Awards (revealed on Friday night after the Opening Night Screening). Our first year ended as a success as we helped showcase some amazing films from all over the world for Georgia audiences and film-makers got the chance to network with one another and have a good time.
YEAR ONE ended! On to Year Two!
No comments:
Post a Comment