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[no dialogue].
(Andrew Rogers). Well, I'm a bit screwed now
because I planned to spend the first 20 minutes
talking about myself.
So.
[laughter].
Not sure what we're going to do here.
I need to start off before we do anything else, by saying
if anyone would like to make me feel better and move
to the first three or four rows, I would encourage you to do so,
but only if you wish to.
I also want to mention that this, this is a lecture hall,
but I don't want to give a lecture.
That's not, I don't, I'm not a teacher,
that's not my background.
I'd rather this be a little bit more of a conversation.
So, I'm actually going to talk a little bit, the topic of this
discussion is purposely vague, the importance of independance.
So that can mean a lot of different things, and I'm going
to interpret it a couple ways, and then talk a bit about
the world of independent film.
So, you know just jump off.
Let's see, the next 20 minutes will be about me.
So, my background, as Rod mentioned is I came
from Eastern.
I was a journalism major and I was really interested in
reporting and story telling.
And pretty soon after graduating, and getting out in
the professional world, I found myself really attracted to film.
And it was, it's an illusive thing.
If any of you have been to some of the other panels here,
with Luke and Craig earlier, you sense the tone that
the film industry is not a welcoming one.
It's one that you have to overcome obstacles
to get into oftentimes.
That's true from a Hollywood perspective, but not quite
as true from an independent perspective.
From the point of view of just wanting to create film,
for film's sake.
Less the commercial, more the artistic.
So as I started learning about film, watching more film
and kind of absorbing it, I found myself really drawn to
a lot of independent cinema and films that weren't being shown
at the local multiplex.
So, I just use that as my departure point so you
understand my background of how I even got involved in this.
I'd never even been a film festival before until I covered
one when I was based in LA, and I covered
the Sundance Film Festival.
And I attended and it, the Sundance was the biggest
film festival in the country.
It was the very first festival I ever went to, and it was there
that I was really exposed to all the different segments
of the independent film world.
The producers, the sales agents, the film makers,
the distributers, the publicist, the whole gamut.
And you really started, I started to see that there's
perhaps a place for me in that independent world.
And that's led me a few years later now, I do run this
film festival in North Carolina.
It's been around ten years, this is my third year
as the director, and my job is, as I mentioned,
is to program the festival.
Is to find the films for it, but also to raise the money for it.
As a matter of fact, a few weeks ago, I launched our 2008
fiscal year 2009 donor campaign in the midst of a recession,
which is a fantastic time to ask people for money.
But we've become a festival that's very successful
in what we do.
We show a lot of international films, films that just come from
outside the mainstream that are escaping the regular multiplex.
And that's kind of where I'd like to start off
with discussing, is that kind of film.
I really want to talk first about,
kind of the importance of film.
You're all here obviously, because cinema in some sense,
has an importance in your life or it means something to you.
Film is an incredible, incredible medium.
It's, the impact is immediate.
And it's, it has a power and an immediacy that you just,
you can find in other art forms, but it's just not quite like
it is in film.
We were discussing it on the way here, and cinema really
is the best way to get inside the artist's head.
After you've say down and watched an hour and a half film,
you've just been immersed in that artist's world.
And it's very, you can do it in theatre, you can do it
in concerts, and other live performance, in paintings,
but it's just not quite the same as a passive absorber of what's
happening up on the screen.
So film, to me has developed into this really powerful,
powerful tool.
I see probably, on average, between 300 and 500
films a year.
Documentaries, student films, narrative features, and I see
all kinds of films from all kinds of places.
And the films that I see are sort of a window into all
of these places and people, and experiences that I never,
that I never would have had access to.
And I think that that is actually the central theme
of what I'm going to use today, and that is that independance,
in cinema is really what the leads to is diversity of voices,
of perspectives, and of opinions.
Independance at its core means alternative and additional
and nuanced ways of looking at things.
You know, that we all know, at the multiplex you know, you can,
any given weekend you can see lots of entertainment.
Pardon me.
You can see, you know the new Batman movie.
You can see all the comic book characters of the rainbow.
You can see, you know, the big splashy things,
the new Atonement, the new Kiera Knightly film,
the new Tom Cruise film and those are great, and they have
a place in the world, and I love some of those just as much as
other folks do.
But the independent film world which presents a broader
spectrum of the world and windows into places that
we don't see everyday, I think has a place
that is often overlooked.
So, I'm going to get back to that, what I'm actually going to
do is discuss the different sort of facets of the film industry
as it relates to the independent cinema world.
But I want to talk for just a moment about art.
Touring this facility today, it's a really impressive,
impressive facility.
And it underscores this thought that I have that art is,
well first of all art, not all film is art.
I think we can all agree to that, but some film is art.
Art is subjective and if I mention any film titles here
as being either good or bad, that's either my opinion
or one that I've agreed with that somebody else said.
It's by no means correct, so when I make fun of the new
Batman movie, or Spiderman, or whatever, I don't mean it as
a slight or that I know what I'm talking about, it just means
that's my opinion and you all obviously have your own.
But when you have, the thing to keep in mind is that art
can't be forced to happen.
Art is something that just happens.
Cinema isn't something that can be made to be good,
and for an example of this, I think it's good to look
at Eisenstein, Sergei Eisenstein.
Who made for instance, "Battleship Potemkin"
which is one of the classic films and one of the classic
directors of all time.
And whose work still inspires to this day.
And scenes and cuts, and styles of film making that he sort of
originated and invented, are still used throughout
cinema today.
And he came from a very oppressive, brutal regime which
was very restrictive, constrictive, and it had
very regimented rules and ideologies to work within.
And yet out of that came this beautiful flowering,
blossoming work, vision.
And throughout his career he demostrated that time
and time again, that he was able to just pull from the either
these visions and this creation that was inspiring
and we celebrate to this day.
Now if you look on the other side of that,
compare that to George Lucas.
Here's a man who made untold millions, and then when it came
time to go back to make Star Wars, his new trilogy,
he literally had the pocketbook.
He had the ability to fund anything in the world
that he wanted.
He had the world at his fingertips, he could make
anything he wanted, the sky was the limit, and he created
the three new "Star Wars" movies.
And I think we'd be very hard pressed to find people who
really, truly could call that art, what he created.
So it's an example of a restrictive world where
the least likely chance that something beautiful would emerge
is where some of the most enduring classic things
came from, and then another place where you had,
in the future with Lucas where you had the unlimited
opportunities where, in a way fell flat.
And again, I want to underscore when we talk about art and
cinema, I don't mean that films that are not art are not good,
because that's also not a fair thing to say.
Pardon me.
So that's the thing that we know as artists or as critical
watchers of cinema, is that art and cinema, great cinema,
as in great art, requires talent and it requires vision.
But I think also important is perspective.
And again that's what the idea of independance brings to this.
In the independent film world, which is existing, concurrent,
and overlapping with the mainstream world that we're all
familiar with, cinema happens and is shown, and exhibited,
around the world at festivals and art houses.
It's made by people in Charleston, Illinois,
to Los Angeles, to Bangkok, to the furthest reaches of Africa.
It's cinema that happens from all areas.