In celebration of the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival’s 10th anniversary this year, founders Lloyd Komesar and Jay Craven curated an extra special program to take the festival back to roots as a unique space for first and second-time filmmakers to gain indispensable knowledge about their craft.
For this year’s big anniversary, taking place from August 21-25 in Middlebury, Vermont, Komesar and Craven arranged visits from big names like Platoon and JFK director Oliver Stone and Moonstruck screenwriter and playwright John Patrick Shanley. It’s all part of their strategically stacked schedule, designed to offer emerging filmmakers a chance to learn from each other as well as from filmmakers who are further along on their career path.
“The Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival can be on the map as a place where you will encounter filmmakers of significance from whom you were able to glean, if you’re the audience or the visiting filmmaker, a sense of understanding of how their career came together and what might be the takeaway for you,” festival producer Lloyd Komesar tells MovieMaker.
“Honorees are very important, not because we are interested in doing a celebrity based festival — which we don’t — but we think that new filmmakers who come here from around the world are inspired by the presence of people like Oliver Stone and last year Alexander Payne,” he adds.
“When you have signals from a filmmaker of their stature that they’re going to come for several days and they they would like to screen a bunch of films, and they want to see the audiences and enter and interact with filmmakers, it just creates a level of engagement that is super stimulating. I would say we have gone to extra lengths.”
This year, Komesar put an emphasis panels and discussions. On Thursday alone, there are three panels tailored to different interesting within the film industry: animation, festival networking strategy, and editing.
“The idea of aggregating panels this year is so that there’s a critical mass of them. I know some festivals wish to stretch them out and put them in different places, but we adopted a strategy this year of trying to put them in a place where everybody can say, ‘I’m going to go to this one. What are you doing? I’ll go to the other one and we’ll compare notes later.’ So this is a new approach for us,” Komesar says.
“If you want to come to the festival on Wednesday, we will reward you. If you want to stay through Sunday, we will reward you… We tried to schedule aggressively so that each of our many time periods through the five days is competitive.”
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How the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival Began
Komesar was inspired to start the Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival after he left his job of 25 years as a film and TV distribution executive at Disney. He couldn’t stay away from the film world for long, however, and was soon drawn back in.
“I found myself sort of volunteering at a startup festival in Pasadena where I live half the year in California. After that was over, my wife said to me, ‘Oh, you should do that. You should start a film festival.’ At that point, L.A. had maybe 30 or 40 of them. But Middlebury had zero, and we had already been coming here,” he says.
It was around that time that Komesar had met Craven, the festival’s artistic director and a filmmaker himself, at a screening of his 2015 movie Northern Borders starring Bruce Dern and Geneviève Bujold. Not long after, they decided to start the festival together, with its special emphasis on emerging filmmakers.
For Craven, watching the festival grow over the past decade and create bonds between filmmakers has been very rewarding.
“I think we’ve refined it in a number of ways. The audience has grown. The number of filmmakers applying have grown. In the old days, we would maybe curate some of the films that played Sundance or South by Southwest. Now, those films are actually applying to the festival, which is a sign that we’re basically being taken more seriously, that the imprint of the festival has has grown and deepened,” Craven says.
“The impact on filmmakers is substantial, because the festival offers a lot of connectedness. There are a lot of opportunities for connection. We also stay in touch with filmmakers between festivals. They come back. If they bring their first film to us, they frequently bring in their second film to us. They sometimes come even after that as a special guest, or with filmmakers that they’re championing.”
As Komesar prepares to step down from his position as producer of the festival, he’s excited to welcome new executive director Caitlin Boyle. He’ll remain on the board of the festival, but is passing on the more hands-on operations to Boyle.
“I will continue to do the things I do well — which is raise money, meet with sponsors, meet with donors, and continue to be a face of the festival, so that we can make her transitional month a smooth one,” Komesar says. “We have built up a considerable amount of community equity here. We put Middlebury on the map with our festival. It used to be described as our little festival, but not so much anymore.”
Main Image: Lloyd Komesar, courtesy of Middlebury New Filmmakers Festival