Nearly every regional film festival has a section for locally produced shorts, features and documentaries. But the Little Rock Film Festival is one of the few where local films are almost as big a draw as ones starring famous actors.
North Little Rock filmmaker Daniel Campbell has won the festival's Charles B. Pierce Award for best Made in Arkansas short film three times -- including for his debut, Antiquities, which he's about to expand into a full-length movie. He said that even though he has taken his shorts around the world, he has never seen audiences like Little Rock's.
"At some of the biggest festivals, I've shown my films to like 15 to 20 people. Here, the audiences for the Made in Arkansas programs are standing room only almost every time."
This year, that crowd can look forward to an eclectic batch including The Ask, Edmund Lowry's short film about the perfect sales pitch; The Hanging of David O. Dodd, a theater/cinema hybrid about the death of a Confederate spy; Chris Hicky's fiction film The Grace of Jake, about an ex-con digging into his roots; Sassy & The Private Eye, Tanner Smith's short about a detective working for Bigfoot; and Jordan Mears' Vampire Killing Prostitute.
Festival programmer Levi Agee also has a short in one of the Made in Arkansas programs: Rapture Us, about a relationship between two people left behind after the biblical rapture.
It's not all that unusual for people involved with the festival to have a film screening too, since many -- like the festival's new director Gabe Gentry -- first came to the festival as filmmakers.
"An ancillary benefit of the festival is that it's created a very strong bond within the Arkansas filmmaking community," Gentry says.
"It gave us an opportunity to discover each other." Campbell agrees. "I feel like the Little Rock filmmaking community would be nonexistent without the festival."
Gentry and Campbell believe the existence of Made in Arkansas and the mini-society it has nurtured has forced local filmmakers to work harder so they won't fall behind their peers.
"A lot of people make films to be a part of the festival each year," Gentry says. "It's an opportunity to be inspired by one another and collaborate and talk."
Campbell chuckles, then backs him up.
"It's almost like a job with a deadline. I've got to make sure I've created something and that it's good enough to get in. It puts pressure on filmmakers in a good way, to make movies and not be lackadaisical about it."
-- Noel Murray
Style on 05/10/2015