CHARLOTTE — After nearly a week of back-to-back screenings, daily panels and over nine months of preparation, the Charlotte Film Festival wrapped up its 17th iteration at the Independent Picture House Sunday evening.
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In a dimly lit, 17-seat theater, dubbed the “Micro-Cinema,” Channel 9’s Zoe Penland sat down with the festival’s co-director and senior film lecturer at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte, Jay Morong, and dancer turned award-winning producer, director, and writer, Natalie Metzger, as they reflected on the importance of elevating unique voices in independent filmmaking.
Zoe Penland: Tell me a bit about your professional backgrounds and what led you to the Charlotte Film Festival.
Natalie Metzger: Well, I came into film in a really circuitous route. I had plans to start my own dance theater company, so I went to grad school at CalArts and got my master’s. While I was there, I started helping my film school friends out with their films, and then I started filming my own choreography, making short, little dance films. They started getting some awards, getting some attention, and then my film school friend started asking me, “Hey, can you help me make my short the way that you did your shorts?” not realizing that I was starting to produce, and it was kind of this light bulb moment where I thought, “Wait, I can get paid to do this.”
Jay Morong: You know, I’m a kid of the late ’70s, early ’80s, so I just grew up devouring films. I always say, if you were of a certain age in 1983, ‘84, ‘85, I don’t know how you don’t love movies. You know, “Gremlins” and “Back to the Future.” But I was always really kind of vagabond in the film world. I just liked movies, and I like theater — those were my two gateway drugs for the arts. Where are the cool theater companies, where are the weirdos who were doing fun and interesting things artistically, and then when I got to Charlotte, it was the Charlotte Film Festival.
What’s the core mission behind the Charlotte Film Festival?
Morong: The mission is discover different. That’s the driving mission, and it doesn’t mean that everything has to be so unique and special that we’ve never seen it before, but it’s what’s different about a film that might elevate it above the normal stuff that you see. It’s approaching something that we all know from a different angle. It’s unique storytelling, unique voices. Representing non-traditional groups is an important thing in film festivals, and I think we try to do that the best we can.
Natalie, having participated in film festivals all around the world, is there anything particularly special about this event in Charlotte?
Metzger: We’ve had films playing here since 2017, but this is the first time I was able to actually come, and it’s been wonderful. First of all, this theater is so awesome, so cool. You can actually feel how unique and artist-driven it is, and the team has been so easy to work with, so thoughtful about their programming and really wanting interesting, cool content, and that’s just been really fun to see.
How does the festival reflect the Charlotte community and local film scene?
Morong: We like to think of ourselves as an umbrella festival. Charlotte is the 14th largest city in the country. Everybody is here. The representation in this city is very broad, so we think of that a lot — what is Charlotte? And Charlotte is global. We do interact with the local film community in a lot of different ways. This year, in particular, is the first time in many years where we’ve done these daily talks. So the idea was Charlotte film people could go to this party and meet filmmakers, like Natalie, who were from out of town and network and interact with each other.
Are there any standout films from this year’s lineup that you’re especially excited about?
Metzger: I was really impressed with the shorts block yesterday. It was such a wide range of stories and also genres and filmmakers too. There was a diversity there. The stories being told were each very unique in their own way.
What kind of work goes into planning a festival like this?
Morong: How much time do you have? So, it’s a nine-month endeavor, and the first couple of months are pretty easy because it’s just submissions and things are trickling in. It’s marketing, just getting the word out. And then it’s like a snowball rolling downhill. You hit this saturation point around late July where you have the biggest snowball of all, and you’ve got to start making decisions — events, films, scheduling. It’s nonstop really from March.
And on top of that, you’re a senior lecturer at UNC Charlotte. In your faculty bio, you say your primary focus as an educator is the relationship of digital media to performance and culture and the relationship of theatre to society. How would you say these interests shape your work with the festival?
Morong: There’s a very interesting thing. It’s like, what is this thing that’s performance art, theater, dance, and what’s this thing that’s visual art, film? They’re different. We have different ways of experiencing them, but they intersect with each other in such a unique way. It all comes down to that kind of basic storytelling. Susanne Langer, a philosopher who talked about art quite a bit, said art is the creation of form, symbolic of human feeling, and that’s how this all makes sense to me. Whether you’re a theater person, a film person, or a dance person, ultimately, you’re just trying to find things that speak to some universal truth and what it’s like to be a human being. When it comes to the Charlotte Film Festival and the Independent Picture House, it really becomes the nonprofit community thing. How can we speak to human experience, human feeling and expression, and also be aware that sometimes those things don’t generate dollars.
Natalie, the festival featured three of your films this year: “Under The Lights,” “Queens of the Dead,” and “Randy as Himself.” Tell me about these projects and what it’s been like showcasing them here in Charlotte.
Metzger: “Under the Lights” is a coming-of-age film about a boy with epilepsy who desperately wants to go to prom and feel like a normal kid, even though the lights might make him have a seizure. It’s a story about a young man trying to find independence while also struggling with a disability. And the writer, director, Miles Levine, has epilepsy, and wrote it based on his own experiences of trying to fit into society and and trying to find independence from his mother, but also recognizing his limitations. “Queens of the Dead” is a horror comedy about a group of club kids, drag queens and frenemies that all have to come together to fight off the zombie apocalypse one night in Brooklyn. It’s written and directed by Tina Romero, who’s the daughter of George Romero. It’s a very fun and playful twist on the typical Romero zombie film, and also very contemporary, queer and fresh. And “Randy as Himself” is a short. I call it a dark comedy about a small town in Texas that has a Hollywood true crime show come in to film. One of the people who was involved in the true crime gets roped in, and it becomes a very darkly comedic investigation of that. The director is Margaret Miller, and her first short premiered at Cannes, and this is her follow-up to that.
What inspires you in your personal film and artistic endeavors?
Metzger: I’m always looking for unique stories told from unique voices, and for me, that’s about finding a story that I’ve never seen before, or from a filmmaker that I haven’t seen anything from their perspective before. Sometimes, there’s just a gut thing, of like, I just respond to this and I like it, so it should get made. I love things that have a little bit of social commentary. I love things that have some heart but also some comedy.
What draws you to independent filmmaking as opposed to big Hollywood blockbusters?
Metzger: I think the creative freedom. I come from the arts world, making theater and making my own pieces and not having to answer to anyone, and independent film is kind of the closest you can get to that. Not to say there’s not merit and artistic expression in big studio movies, but you have a little bit more freedom.
What keeps you passionate about working in film, especially in a changing film landscape that prioritizes streaming?
Metzger: Making movies can be so hard, and it’s very creatively satisfying, but it’s also very tough, especially nowadays. You’re working with smaller and smaller budgets and having to wear that many more hats and getting that much less sleep, but honestly, the things that keep me going are events like this. It’s getting to watch the film with an audience, sitting in the movie theater, having the lights go out and everyone is watching the same story together. That communal experience gets me every time. I find it to be emotional. Oftentimes, I will cry at screenings because there’s something so powerful about people gathering together to share in a combined story.
What’s your hope for the Charlotte Film Festival, let’s say five years from now?
Morong: We’ve had a lot of really robust audiences, and that’s really exciting when 50 people are sitting on a Sunday afternoon watching a Ukrainian documentary about a deaf man. You know, I’m not sentimental, but that does fill my heart in a way. If we can maintain that, I’m good, because none of us are getting rich on this. We just want to bring movies to people and have them have an experience with their community. So, I think if we project it out five years from now, and we were exactly where we’re at, I’d be like, we’re doing good. But, I mean, who knows? It’d be great to be in a position where maybe we have to do a two-week festival, because we need the space.
And finally, what advice would you give to emerging filmmakers looking to get noticed in the indie film world?
Metzger: I feel like persistence is one of the key things that I would encourage for any filmmaker because it’s a hard world to make it in. There’s a lot of rejection, but that isn’t a reason to stop doing what you’re doing. A story I like to tell is Jocelyn DeBoer and Dawn Leubbe are the writers, directors and stars of a film we made called “Greener Grass.” They made three shorts before that, and they submitted all of them to Sundance. All those shorts got rejections. They didn’t get a personal letter. They didn’t get anything. They just got a flat-out rejection. So we submitted the feature to Sundance, because that’s what you do, and when we got the call accepting the film into Sundance, the programmer said they had been following them for the past five years, loving every short they submitted. So for them, that was five years of rejection where they had no idea that someone was following them. You might be getting rejections, but you don’t know who you’ve already resonated with, so keep making your work.
Morong: I will also add to that story that “Greener Grass” was an alumni of the Charlotte Film Festival, and it resonated with us quite a bit.
“Queens of the Dead” will be in theaters around the country starting Oct. 24. Metzger says “Under The Lights” will release in theaters sometime next year.
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