Last night I took the long trek on public transportation from Albany Park to the Naperville suburbs to volunteer as a peon at a small, new film festival: NIFF. To be specific, I operated part of the Short Film Program in Room A at the Holiday Inn Select. I enjoyed the work, but there were a few bumps along the festival’s primordial road.
My handful of patrons was elderly, and one couple left during the first short, Ink to Paper (trailer), the gentleman notifying me that the bloody masquerade was trash not suitable for him to watch. I agreed, not because I thought it was worthless, but because I think it should have had an “R” rating and should have been made into a comedy, not a horror film. It was badly maneuvered into the Coan Brothers vein of dark comedy, but wasn’t marketed that way. What was most unfortunate about that fourth of the audience leaving was that most of the films shown the rest of the night were harmless non-fiction shot documentary-style. Watching the elderly react to the slasher and mafia film (Parts) gave me a better sense of their perspective. Many of them would visibly and audibly cringe when a knife went into skin, even when it happened off-screen.
Overall, I think the festival, in its second year, has a good future but needs to focus more. It has too many films for its small audience, and a week long is just too much for their market. They need to show fewer films, raising the bar for entrance, and increase the presentation (and complications) of each movie by giving it an introduction and better viewing areas, as well as better programming. While there is a sense at an independent film festival that “anything goes”–you can get all sorts of films right next to each other–I think it was particularly careless of them to place high-flying murder next to subtitled documentary. In fact I think they can go as far as to split nights by genre. The majority who came on my night where there for the biographic, family, and documentary films and were disturbed by the rest.
These were the films I saw with promise:
(more…)