Cannes Do

The Edwood Film Festival Raises the Bar

by Jack Rightmyer and photographs by Timothy Cahill, August 24, 2007

When Tobias Seamon got the phone call in mid-May that his five-minute screenplay Amerikan Partizan had been accepted into Albany’s Edwood Film Festival, he was excited and a bit anxious at the same time. “Like any acceptance, it had that ‘Wow’ feeling,” Seamon remembers. “But I also knew I was getting into something, filmmaking, that I had no experience ever doing before.”

Since it was launched in 2000, the Edwood Film Festival has become the Capital Region’s preeminent annual film event. Once a one-night affair on an improvised screen in an Albany bar, this year’s festival will be screened at the Spectrum 8 Theatres over the course of a week, from September 28 through October 4. It will present work in two categories, short films up to 15 minutes, and five-minute mini-films called “microsodes.” Twenty microsodes will be presented, all of them created specifically for the festival and selected by a panel of judges from more than 200 submissions.

The idea for the event dates back to 1999, when a group of wannabe filmmakers were sitting around over beers, talking about how they were going to be the next Truffaut or Spielberg. “It was a motley collection of folks,” says Peter Barnett, the founder of the festival. “Some of us had made films in college, and some of us had only shot vacation films. We set a deadline to make a short film, and in 2000 the pub put up a screen and we showed the 17 films. They were all of varying degrees of awful, but the place was packed, although most people left after the five-minute film showing a character drinking steadily and then projectile vomiting. That’s when it occurred to us that we had better pre-screen these films.”

They named their festival in honor of Ed Wood, the maverick, low-budget director and actor from the 1950s and ’60s. It’s Wood’s eccentric, can-do attitude that guides the festival’s organizers, not the fact that he’s considered by many to be the worst filmmaker of all time. “Ed Wood is the inspiration,” says Barnett. “We know his name conjures amateur filmmaking, which we embody, but we don’t want people to make crap. We want our film festival to be inspired, homegrown moviemaking.”