Youth Film Festival – Memphis Flyer

Indie Memphis began in 1998 when University of Memphis film student Kelly Chandler wanted to create a space where her fellow students could showcase their work. As the festival grew into a major Memphis cultural event, artist development remained a major part of the mission. In 2016, the Indie Memphis Youth Film Fest was launched to help give middle- and high-schoolers a taste of the highs and lows of filmmaking.

“We’re giving these students an opportunity to really explore it before they say, ‘This is definitely what I wanna do,’” says Joseph Carr, Indie Memphis’ managing director.

Students in the CrewUp program are partnered with adult mentors, experienced filmmakers who will guide them through the process of writing, planning, and producing a short film. Carr says that even those who discover filmmaking is not for them get valuable experience in creative collaboration. “It can apply to every part of your life. If you can’t collaborate, you’re not gonna be successful in any field you work in.”

Memphis Youth Showcase feature *Blood and Roots*

One Youth Film Fest participant who did decide it was for her is Vivian Gray, who won awards at the 2017 and 2018 festival. Gray says she entered her work “on a whim,” but found “it was truly a once-in-a-lifetime experience. It shaped so much of my future, just by being able to participate, period. I met other peers who made films, I met the folks at Indie Memphis who are so supportive, and just to show my work for the first time publicly was really special, and I’m very grateful for it.”

Carr acted as her mentor when she won a production grant as a prize in 2017. (The grant program is now awarded by application, separate from the main student competition.) “When you’re young, you don’t have any concept of how much work it’s going to be,” says Carr. “You just have great ideas and you want your ideas to come to life. Vivian was just so game to jump in and just run with her idea. You could tell very early just how comfortable she was on set, and just how comfortable she was in her voice. When you’re in the presence of a true artist, you can tell very quickly that they have a lot to say.”

Gray went on to earn a degree from the acclaimed University of Southern California film program. Her short film, “Tape 23,” debuted at Indie Memphis ’22 and has spent the last year on the festival circuit with “Providence,” a television pilot she directed. She will return to Youth Fest as a juror this year. “I feel like it’s grown even more, and continues to do what it did for me and so many other young filmmakers and artists. It is near and dear to my heart.”

Another artist coming full circle this year is Vivie Myrick. The actor made her screen debut at the Youth Festival and recently appeared on the Showtime TV series, George & Tammy. “She directed a film last year as her last output for her age group in the Youth Film Fest,” says Carr. “Now she’s now back to host an acting workshop.”

The festival will kick off on Saturday, August 26th, with a keynote address by screenwriter Hennah Sekander. The recent Memphis transplant has written for the Apple TV+ series Hello Tomorrow! and the Amazon Prime Video Chris Pratt vehicle The Terminal List. “I’m gonna talk about ‘The Slingshot Effect,’ which is something that I coined under pressure on a phone call with Joseph Carr because he said we needed a title, and it just felt like the most potent symbol for how you marry character and plot to tell a good story.”

When Craig Brewer introduced Sekander to Carr, she immediately asked how to get involved with Indie Memphis’ youth program. “I think a big reason why this writer strike is happening right now is there’s this feeling of resistance from the studio side to invest in new talent and kind of support younger voices as they try to make their way up the ladder,” Sekander says. “So I think that means it’s all the more important for writers to do that work that probably wasn’t done for them.”

The festival is free for students who sign up for passes and pay-what-you-can for adults. The short films which premiere this Saturday at the Halloran Centre will represent the culmination of a year of work by the young filmmakers. “I’m always just beside-myself thrilled when these students finish their movies,” says Carr. “Some teams will drop out, or something will come up, and they can’t finish. But seeing these completed films on the big screen, all the problems we have leading up to it are just melted away.”

The 2023 Indie Memphis Youth Film Fest is Saturday, August 26th, at the Halloran Centre. For the schedule, visit indiememphis.org.

The Indie Memphis Youth Film Festival, preparing to go into its fifth year, is one of the Bluff City art scene’s big success stories. “What’s great about it is, it has expanded every single year,” says Indie Memphis’ Joseph Carr.

This year, like most events of its size, the Youth Film Festival has gone virtual. Carr says that has turned out to be an opportunity to expand the event’s reach. “We’ve always had a national block of of short films in the festival, but this year were actually able to record a Q&A with the student filmmakers from around the country. Those students can now access the local films and engage with the workshops as well. So the virtual setting, which at first felt like a restriction, isn’t really one. It’s opening us up to a lot more involvement from kids outside of Memphis.”

The festival, which usually takes place over a single, long Saturday session in September, has been broken into three days. “We didn’t want to ask students to sit at the computer for 12 straight hours on one day,” says Carr.

Usually, student filmmakers are paired with mentors from the Memphis filmmaking community to help them create short films. This year, gathering restrictions imposed by coronavirus epidemic has made that arrangement impractical. “We have 12 teams of three students with one professional filmmaker as their mentor, kind of guiding them through the process of conceptualizing and producing a short films. But this year, because of the obvious reasons, the students weren’t able to make their films. So instead we pivoted and have had the students put together pitch videos. It was kind of an idea that came from our Black Creators Forum pitch rally.”

The pitch videos will be streamed at noon on Saturday. It’s not the only opportunity student filmmakers will get to learn from experienced filmmakers. The seminars will include a lighting demonstration by cinematographer Jordan Danelz; a class in voice acting by Ashley Johnson, who recently won a BAFTA award for her work on the hit video game The Last of Us; and a seminar in creating for YouTube by Seren Sensei, who was selected as Indie Memphis’ Black Screenwriter resident. There will also be sessions with distinguished Youth Film Fest alumnae Nubia Yasin, and Vivian Gray, who is currently studying at the prestigious University of Southern California film school. “I put together four-person committee of active young filmmakers in Memphis who are part of the program, and that was a big thing for them. They want to hear from other people around their age, because after a while, it starts to feel too much like a classroom if it’s just a bunch of old people telling you how to make movies.”

The 2020 Youth Film Festival kicks off on Friday, August 28th, at 6:30 p.m. with the Memphis Youth Competition Screening, where 15 short films by Bluff City filmmaking crews will compete for cash prizes and a $5,000 production package from Via Productions. You can find out more on the Indie Memphis website.