This year’s Celluloid Bainbridge Film Festival tackles both aspects of “show business” equally.
The “business” side is explored in a series of free workshops and panels at Rolling Bay Hall (10598 NE Valley Road) on Saturday, Nov. 5, inviting interested filmmakers, thespians, writers and cinematographers to come learn the tricks of the pros.
The “show” part begins later that evening with a special opening night screening, and even more in earnest the next day, Sunday, Nov. 6, with a full lineup of big screen fare — shorts, documentaries, web series and features — at the historic Lynwood Theatre (4569 Lynwood Center Road NE).
For this year’s 18th annual festival, again presented by Arts &Humanities Bainbridge, curators spread their wings more than before to seek out some of the best films from around the region.
Tickets are on sale now. The cost varies, with several attendance packages available:
Saturday VIP tickets, including entrance to the opening night party and premiere screening with food and drink vouchers plus the full lineup of Sunday screenings are $50 each. Tickets for the opening night screening and the Sunday festival are $15 each. Tickets for Sunday only are $8 pre-sale, $10 at the door (a special $6 pass is available for students under 18). Visit www.celluloid bainbridge.com/tickets to learn more and purchase. Note: Some films, annotated specifically on the online schedule, are not suitable for younger or easily offended viewers.
At the helm of the 2016 event is festival director Matt Longmire, an island filmmaker and co-director of the very successful “Seattle Web Fest,” a web series-themed festival now heading into its third year. He has worked on films in New York, Los Angeles and Seattle and also with many of Bainbridge Island’s nonprofit and commercial organizations on various multimedia projects.
It was Longmire who was tasked with updating, upgrading and innovating the beloved island tradition to ensure its sustainability and continued appeal as it nears its second decade and looks ahead to the future.
“I stepped in for a year to kind of help them overhaul the festival,” Longmire said. “It was a very, very sweet festival, a very sweet local event that had just kind of stayed the same for a long time and we wanted it to be a real film festival more than just a local showcase.”
Even the name of the event, formerly just Celluloid Bainbridge, wasn’t immune to Longmire’s reboot.
“I said, ‘If they’re under 30 they’re not going to know what celluloid is and if you haven’t been here you’re not going to know what Bainbridge is so we have to include the words film festival,’” he explained. “Every little detail was changed in some way.”
To that end, Longmire vetted submissions in a myriad of genres, lengths and styles from all over the Pacific Northwest, ultimately settling on about 35 films out of a pool of more than 90 hopefuls. Despite the wider net cast, however, plenty of island-based talent remained in the final lineup.
“It’s shaping up to be quite an event,” Longmire said. “The quality this year is incredible.
“[Historically] the focus has been on the location of the films,” he explained. “It was so much about the island, it was almost like if it was made here it’ll play. Whereas this year we had Bainbridge filmmakers who didn’t even get in, and it wasn’t that we didn’t like them or anything like that. It was just that the rule is quality first. You focus on that quality and then you look to what you have time-wise.”
The day-long screening series is broken into blocks of offerings of similar veins, with categories like “student films,” “shot documentaries” and “web series,” among others.
Particularly exciting this year, Longmire said, is the world premiere of “Wood Witch: The Awakening,” a found footage horror/comedy feature made by island filmmakers and starring island talent, and the inclusion of the volatile Lenny Bruce documentary “Looking for Lenny” by Carla Polkinhorn.
“People will either love it and give it a standing ovation or they’ll stand up and walk out,” Longmire said of the profane retrospective. “What he was doing was fighting for freedom of speech and he was trying to make stand up comedy something that lets us talk about the things that make us uncomfortable.
“When I saw this documentary I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, this is surprisingly relevant at the moment.’”
Also unexpectedly delightful, the curator said, was the discovery of the proliferation of great movies by young — some surprisingly so — auteurs, including students from Bainbridge High School and even Hyla Middle School. The unprecedented abundance of affordable movie-making technology that has happened in the last decade or so has given rise to cinematic offerings from totally unexpected places, Longmire explained, making the responsibility of the curators that much more difficult.
“Students have just as much access to [the equipment] as anybody in Hollywood,” Longmire said. “So it’s just up to them and the way their little brains — we have some that were made by really little kids, like eighth-graders — and the way they come up with stories and the way they tell stories is something we now have the chance to see and I love that because I want to encourage that.”
Images courtesy of Celluloid Bainbridge Film Festival “Cab Elvis,” a documentary by Andrew Franks, is one of 31 films featured in this year’s Celluloid Bainbridge Film Festival.
