Tag: Erik Jambor

Categories
Film/TV Film/TV/Etc. Blog

Indie Memphis Film Festival Director Resigns

The Indie Memphis Film Festival has announced the resignation of Executive Director Erik Jambor.

In his seven-year stint as the festival’s first full time executive director, Jambor has overseen the expansion of the festival from its roots as a locally focused, all-volunteer affair into an internationally renown event, screening more than 100 films annually, with year-round programming. The festival became one of the first major events to be held in Overton Square, selling out screenings in Playhouse On The Square and Circuit Playhouse and raising the profile of the entertainment district at a crucial time during its redevelopment. Attendance peaked in 2012, with approximately 12,000 festival goers. 

However, as the festival continued to expand and add screens, attendance has leveled off and dropped over the last two years. In private conversations, Indie Memphis board members have pointed to several factors, including failed outreach beyond the core cinephile audience and the fact that the festival weekend has fallen on the distraction-filled Halloween holiday in the last two years.

A significant shortfall in the festival’s $200,000 annual budget became apparent at the end of 2014, kicking off an internal debate among the board members about the future of the festival. Indie Memphis’ other full time employee, Brighid Wheeler was laid off in January, and Jambor stopped taking his salary in February before finally resigning this week.

In a press release late Friday newly elected board president Ryan Watt, a Memphis-based film producer, said that a search for a new director has begun, and that the search will concentrate on finding someone with non-profit fundraising experience. A scaled-back version of the festival will take place in the fall—although definitely not on Halloween weekend. Watt said this year’s festival will be more locally focused, and that he hopes to reschedule the festival to a more opportune time of year in 2016 and revamping the festival to reflect the changing nature of film audiences. No call for entries has been posted at this time.

Both members of the board and Jambor have characterized his departure as a mutual decision. Jambor has accepted a film fellowship in Italy, and has stated he hopes to return as a consultant to the festival in the future.  

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

In the Spotlight

The Indie Memphis Film Festival kicks off its second decade this week, as the 11th annual festival screens more than 100 films across seven days at Malco’s Studio on the Square theater, bringing such notable film names as former New York Times critic Elvis Mitchell, Hoop Dreams producer Peter Gilbert, and actor/filmmaker Giancarlo Esposito to town.

It’s the first Indie Memphis to be helmed by Erik Jambor, who was hired in the spring to be the festival’s first executive director.

“Things are coming together well,” Jambor says, with less than a week to go before the festival launches. “We’re excited about what we’ve got.”

This is the third film festival Jambor has led after co-founding the Sidewalk festival in Birmingham and spending a year running the BendFilm festival in Oregon.

“For me, it’s been about learning a new community and meeting people who have already been involved, so it’s a transition year in a way,” Jambor says. “I think we have a good shape to everything. I think it’ll be a good indicator of where we’re going to take things in future years. Hopefully, we can get people excited about independent film on a different level than they have been.”

The bones of this year’s festival will be familiar to past attendees: Low-profile regional and local films will compete in feature, documentary, and short categories while being supplemented by higher-profile “showcase” films screening out of competition. Under-the-radar international cinema will screen via the Global Lens series, and local musicians and filmmakers come together in a Music Video Showcase sponsored by Live From Memphis.

“We’ll probably tweak things as we go, but for this year I wanted to leave things pretty similar,” Jambor says. “The call for entries needed to get up as soon as possible, and it was easiest to keep a similar pattern.”

The biggest change to this year’s festival is scheduling. Indie Memphis will use all five screens at Studio on the Square Friday to Sunday, October 10th to 12th, and will pack all competition films into that block.

“We’re front-loading the event, so the weekend is really when the festival is most festive,” Jambor says. “Most of the films running are getting a screening that opening weekend. It lets us focus the energy and excitement.

“Even if you don’t know specifically what you want to see, you can come down that weekend and we’ve got all five screens going, so there are always a good number of options to choose from. I think that will give us the level of energy we’re looking for.”

That energy will include some high-profile films and filmmakers. Mitchell, a former film critic, and Gilbert, who shot and co-produced the landmark documentary Hoop Dreams, will serve on the festival’s juries for features and documentaries, respectively, but will also be in town to present their own work.

Mitchell produced and conducted interviews for The Black List, a documentary series of portraits of accomplished African Americans. Gilbert’s At the Death House Door is a documentary about a Texas death-row chaplain.

Elvis Mitchell

“I’d met Elvis Mitchell a few times at various festivals and ran into him at South by Southwest this past year and talked to him about Memphis,” Jambor says. “He’d never been and was interested in coming. Through that dialogue, we decided to run The Black List as well. It’s already run on HBO, but a lot of people don’t have HBO, so it was a good opportunity.”

Mitchell also will conduct interviews with Memphis filmmaker Craig Brewer and actor/filmmaker Esposito, whose Gospel Hill will screen at the festival. Esposito’s film has a strong local connection via Brewer collaborator Scott Bomar, who worked on the film’s score and soundtrack.

Monday to Thursday, October 13th to 17th, the festival will shrink to two screens at Studio and will mix a few “tentpole” screenings with encore presentations of festival award winners or films that drew particularly well. The full Monday to Thursday schedule will appear on the Indie Memphis website by Monday morning, after awards are presented Sunday night.

Another change this year is less fidelity to the festival’s “Soul of Southern Film” niche.

“That’s still an angle — maybe the main throughline — but we didn’t want to use that to exclude things,” Jambor says.

“I think Southern filmmaking ties into the larger concept of regional filmmaking, and I wanted to be able to find things like The New Year Parade or My Effortless Brilliance, which are very regional as well. That way, we can connect a filmmaker from Philadelphia, like Tom Quinn of New Year Parade, to a filmmaker from Memphis, like Morgan Jon Fox. If you read about the mumblecore movement that [Memphis filmmaker] Kentucker Audley is a part of, a lot of those filmmakers met each other on the film festival circuit. I didn’t want to limit those kinds of potential connections.”

One odd element of this year’s festival is the relative paucity of “hometowner” features, with only two local narrative features in competition: Fox’s OMG/HaHaHa and Brian Pera’s The Way I See Things. Additionally, there are two local documentaries: Brett Hanover’s Bunnyland and Joann Self’s The Arts Interviews: A Compilation.

Jambor says the scant number of local features and docs this year was not a programming decision: “It’s cyclical, I think. We have a good number of short films, but we didn’t get many features.”

Though there are several local filmmakers with feature projects in various stages of development or production, Fox suggests the slim Memphis representation is a result of a comedown from the Hustle & Flow effect: “For a while there, everyone thought they were going to be the next Craig Brewer, then people realized how hard it is [to make films].”

Those local filmmakers who do have work in this year’s festival will be competing on a different plane than in the past: Though the festival has kept its “Hometowner” competition, it also is allowing local films to compete in the general categories this year.

“We’re proud of the films we’re running — a lot of which have never played in the South,” Jambor says. “There are a lot of regional premieres. It’s exciting to be in the position of putting Memphis on the front edge of some of this stuff, to see movies that haven’t just not played Memphis, but haven’t played Nashville or Atlanta or Birmingham yet.”

For a full Indie Memphis schedule and information on tickets, go to indiememphis.com.

For additional Indie Memphis coverage, see memphisflyer.com throughout the festival.

Categories
Film Features Film/TV

One Big Step

CREDIT: Justin Fox Burks

The Indie Memphis Film Festival will begin its second decade when the 11th edition of the festival launches in October. But Indie Memphis seems to be entering adulthood this spring, becoming a fully independent entity and hiring its first full-time executive director in the person of 37-year-old film-fest veteran Erik Jambor.

For most of its first decade, Indie Memphis has been run by self-employed accountant Les Edwards and his wife Emily Trenholm under the umbrella of local arts organization Delta Axis. But late last year, after securing a then-anonymous commitment from local venture capitalist Bob Compton to fund a full-time executive director’s position, Edwards set out to push the organization to a new level. After nearly a decade of helming Indie Memphis, Edwards decided that the festival couldn’t continue to grow without a different management structure.

“If [Indie Memphis] is going to go to the next level, it’s going to have to be with someone who can work on it year-round,” Edwards said earlier this year. “It’s going to take someone who makes their living working in this industry.” Edwards is now chair of the Indie Memphis board.

Enter Jambor, who first met Edwards at the International Film Festival Summit in Las Vegas in December. A Birmingham native who went to film school at Florida State University, Jambor returned to his hometown to co-found the city’s Sidewalk Moving Picture Festival, which he ran for the fest’s first eight years, from 1999 to 2006.

A film editor by training and “lapsed filmmaker” now (“I’m one of those kids who used to make Super-8 movies in the backyard, adventure movies, or stop-motion animated movies with Star Wars figures”), Jambor was introduced to the world of film festivals when his 1996 short film Gamalost (which he wrote, directed, and edited) premiered at the Seattle International Film Festival.

“I kept talking to friends about all these great films I saw at festivals out in the world,” Jambor says, “and finally they’d say, well, stop talking about them, because we’re never going to see them here. So we started brainstorming about starting our own festival.”

Jambor built Sidewalk from the ground up, turning it into one of the most lauded small film festivals in the country. It was cited by Time magazine as one of the dozen or so best festivals “for the rest of us” and by MovieMaker as a “film festival worth the entry fee.”

Jambor left Birmingham last year to run the BendFilm festival in Bend, Oregon.

“It seemed like a good place to further some of the ideas I had with Sidewalk, the notion of filmmaker retreats, where filmmakers could connect,” Jambor says. “But Bend itself proved to be a little too isolated for the budget we were able to put together. It was an extra flight from Portland or Seattle. It was harder to get people there. And there wasn’t much of a filmmaker community in central Oregon, so I couldn’t be as connected as I was trying to be.”

Enter Memphis. Jambor was eager to return south, and with his sister living in Cordova, Memphis was a good fit.

“[Indie Memphis] was appealing to me because of the film community that’s actually here,” Jambor says. “In Birmingham, there wasn’t a homegrown film scene until we started the festival, whereas Memphis has a richer tradition that resonates [outside the city]. There are great things we can do that build on the first decade of the festival.”

Jambor started the job in March but kept a low profile early on, learning the city and setting up shop at Indie Memphis’ new offices, which overlook the trolley tracks at the corner of Main and Peabody Place downtown.

Because the Sidewalk and BendFilm festivals are also in the fall, Jambor had never been to the Indie Memphis Festival before taking the job.

“It’s still pretty early right now,” Jambor says of his plans for Indie Memphis. “We’re doing some brainstorming to figure out what things to include and for me to get an understanding of what’s happened in the past. Going back and looking through the festival programs, I’ve found that so much that I’d want to do already has been done. They’ve done a great job with just a volunteer staff.”

The communal aspects of the Sidewalk festival, which online film-fest addicts write about romantically, probably provide a clue to Jambor’s philosophy.

“We wanted to do something community-based, [something rooted in] what makes a festival festive instead of having a screening-series mentality,” Jambor says of Sidewalk. To that end, Jambor and his fellow festival founders thought of Sidewalk as a film version of a popular Birmingham music festival. The music festival that provided inspiration was one “where they’d block off downtown streets and set up stages and there was a feeling of exploration and discovery that we thought was cool, where you didn’t have to know any of the bands, you’d just walk around and let your ears guide you. A headliner might make you buy a ticket for a day, but when you get down there you find other things you like.

“I see a film festival the same way. We can have ticketing that emphasizes exploration and discovery. I want everyone intermingling and hanging out. We should play up the fact that you can walk over to Boscos after a screening and end up hanging out at the bar with a filmmaker whose work you just saw. So it extends beyond just going and watching a film in a big room. Normal audiences who have never been to a film festival can still feel connected.”

As for Indie Memphis, Jambor says he plans to maintain the festival’s status as a showcase for local filmmaking and maintain its regional “Soul of Southern Film” peg, but he also wants to expand more into other areas.

“I think that’s what you’ll see us moving to in the second decade,” Jambor says. “With the Soul of Southern Film awards and Hometowner awards in place, there’s plenty of room to bring in more great work from other parts of the country.”

In terms of programming, Jambor suggests he’ll aggressively target and pursue films based on his own film-festival travels and connections.

“You can’t rely on the random call for entries, because you don’t know from year to year who’s going to happen to see your ad and know about your festival and send in a film,” Jambor says. “A lot of filmmakers [with films at the big, early festivals like] Sundance and South by Southwest, if they’ve done well, they’re then busy and aren’t thinking about festival strategy for the fall. So you have to be out front thinking about what films you want to invite in.”

Jambor also will work on more non-festival programming, seeking to increase Indie Memphis’ year-round presence. In addition to its monthly microcinema series, the organization has also sponsored two events this year, a screening of Compton’s celebrated education documentary Two Million Minutes: A Global Examination and an invite-only screening of Ira Sachs’ Married Life, both with the filmmakers in attendance.

Jambor will continue this strategy of bringing filmmakers and audiences together with a screening of the hour-long political documentary Considering Democracy: 8 Things To Ask Your Representative at Studio on the Square at 7 p.m. on Monday, May 19th. Filmmaker Keya Lea Horiuchi will attend and lead a post-screening discussion.