Photo Credit: Denise Jans @dmjdenise

BY Chas Ames

Chas Ames: I'm talking with Wade Neal, the Assistant Executive Director for Grand Cinema.. He's going to tell us about the Tacoma Film Festival. All right, go ahead and unreel your tale of the Tacoma Film Festival, the origins and anything essential you think needs to be said.

Wade Neal: It's been a long project that really has its roots in the mid '90s. When the Grand Cinema first started, and started as a profit theater back in '95. And then two years later turned into a nonprofit. And there were always a lot of folks trying to start up something, they were playing independent films, international films, documentaries, things like that are of major substance in Tacoma back then. But a lot of times, they would just be sort of one-offs, wonderful one-offs or, different movie theaters around town. And so then that kind of coalesced into the grand scheme of being a center for art, more artistic films and films from local filmmakers. And I do recall there was a there was a film festival, kind of a film festival that somebody put on back in '97, '98, that sort of had baby steps towards something bigger. And then before I became involved with Grand Cinema directly, in 2006, they started the Film Festival and it's just been an annual extremely heartfelt small festival that's just kind of grown to have a reputation of excellence and warmth and welcome and gathering for filmmakers and film fans alike since then. 

CA: It occurs to me that just not every film festival says, alright, throw your films at us. Is there typically a theme? How does it come to a film festival, select the films that it's going to 'festival'.

WN: Well, Tacoma Film Festival selects its films, in large part, from submissions from all around the country and all around the world. And so we create an entry portal. And we sort of put ourselves out there on the internet and we receive submissions from a lot of different places. And we use a volunteer screening team as well as Grand Cinema film festival staff to watch all the films and figure out which ones fit the festival. It emphasizes independent voices. It emphasizes diverse voices, it emphasizes newer filmmakers that are kind of growing into their careers and their artistic development. And it also emphasizes the Pacific Northwest as well. So we, for instance, we have three submission entry fees for Pacific Northwest film, so we get quite a few of those. And so when I say this, Northwest, I mean Washington, Oregon, Idaho.  And Vancouver, BC. We get some film from up there too, and that creates a draw for the filmmakers to attend and share their works in person with the audience.

CA: So there is some emphasis on underserved voices and visions that perhaps do not have a venue anywhere else.

WN: I think we try to be the focal point for stories that might not be told elsewhere, or might have trouble finding an audience because in the age of the internet, you throw a video up on YouTube, sure, you can make a film and YouTube might have success. You might have failure, but you're not focused on it. There's so much out there it's just like chaos. And when you bring these wonderful stories from underserved communities from a variety of different directors or people who are starting out as new directors, things like new film crews, filmmakers, then you have an opportunity to really draw the attention to it  and also show the film where it's supposed to be shown in the theater. Watching a film on your phone just isn't the same. When you see a film with an audience, even if it's a documentary, that's the magic window. There's no substitute for it.

CA: Now let's get into the subjects, the specifics of the substance. How many selections come at you? How many different people do you have screening it and what do you narrow it down to?

WN: This year, we had about 100 submissions and so I think it might have 200 or 400 hours at this point. There's quite a few and we have a team of volunteers and staff, I would guess about 10 people, including myself, go through all the films kind of as a first wave to select the ones that might be the right fit. And then this year we actually accepted quite a few submissions. So about 90% of our films this year are from submitted films, which we feel is important because people have put the effort into wanting to join our film festival. I suppose it's about 20% were accepted.

CA: Can you tell us what awards they might be lined up for?

WN: Yes, we have 14 awards that are selected by our jury and/or audience. They are fairly the ones you would expect. We have Best Narrative or Dramatic Feature, Best Documentary Feature, Best Dramatic or Narrative Short Film, Documentary Short Film, and the like. And then there are similar categories for the Pacific Northwest section of the those as well. And we also have a Late Night Short Award, and an Experimental Short Film Award, and several audience awards that are all selected by the audience voting for each featured short.

CA: All right now let's get to the heart of the matter here. Let's talk about some of the selections that you've seen. And if you've noticed if they have representative, any kind of a contemporary cultural shift.

WN: We received a lot of submissions that really display a lot of energy and just a lot of desire to tell unique stories. And there's so much variety within the submissions that we received. And also of course, the ones that we've selected.  It's just astounding to me how much creativity is out there in our world. We have so many people working so hard to bring unique stories to the screen. I can't help but always be floored. It's so easy to look around and feel that we're missing something in our culture and things are shifting too quickly. I think that we're kind of living in a golden age of creativity. People have access to technology, access to film technology, like they've never had before. And they're really using it in amazing ways. And creating. These are the people who are creating the styles of film that you're going to see as commonplace within the next 5, 10 years. It's so exciting to me to see this total earthquake of creativity that will develop into what we all come to accept as the norm later on. So I think the theme is just an explosion of creativity that we are almost like we're a goldfish and we're breathing the water. We don't understand that how much creativity is around but it's just like it's just astounding and exciting for us to be the conduit for it.

CA: I wanted to point out what you were saying in terms of the accessibility of the technology and equipment. It's true when the festival started that those capabilities just did not exist. Not everybody had, say for instance a camera on their phone. Not that people are shooting, but you know could, and it no doubt gives an inspiration. So do you want to maybe talk about the when the festival started 18 years ago how was it different versus now?

WN: The biggest difference between film festivals and the Tacoma Film Festival, specifically between 2006 and today is definitely access to technology in more ease of transfer of files and movies. So we have a lot more that we can take in and review and then we also have a lot more that we can really play. And I think back in those days people would even record on digital tape or VHS and so the quality would be a little bit lower and things like that. But like you said, you know, we have iPhones.  Can you imagine the capability of an iPhone versus 8mm film from the '20s? I think we have at least 16mm film or maybe an 8mm film because they have their own particular flavor of beauty I think that we I love to see as well. But yeah, that's a huge difference in just the amount of an ease of access to it because we used to have people have to ship every single film in. Now we pretty much accept them through the internet with no loss in quality. So it's a little bit easier for us to manage the logistics aspect of it too.

CA: All right, let's get right to some of the selections. I imagine you probably don't want to place too much judgment on any one or a set but can you maybe tell us about some of the selections that people can look forward to?

WN: The TFF selections we're really proud of this year and very excited,  I'll just talk about our our headliner events. Our opening night film Fantasy A Gets A Mattress is a Seattle film, local filmmakers, local stars about a rapper who is on a quest to find a mattress and it's just hilarious, has a little bit of dark comedy, but very funny. And it's a really exciting film and it's been a really big hit in Seattle. And we're really excited to bring it to Tacoma. Because it's just like, I feel like it's one of those new generation films. That's just a blast. So that's our opening night film.  You might see some mattresses with Fantasy A Gets a Mattress spray-painted on it around town. That's been really spreading around so that's super exciting. Our centerpiece film is a documentary called Immediate Family, and it tracks the careers of some of the most accomplished incredible musicians in rock and pop music of the 20th century who are totally relatively unknown, although you might recognize some of them from just seeing them on stage with certain artists. But this group, this group of four artists has backed some of the greatest singers and bands of all time, like Stevie Nicks, James Taylor. They've, worked with members of the Eagles, and some of the music that they've written for Carole King, and some of the music that they have written everybody knows the songs.  The documentary is sort of a sequel in some ways to a movie that came out a few years ago, called The Wrecking Crew, which is a similar story about artists who back some of the greatest bands and musicians of the '60s, like the Beach Boys and The Birds and just similar, you know, Nancy Sinatra. Similarly, those artists were relatively unknown, because they were behind the scenes, but they became famous through how talented they were, in the end, just incredible. Using musicianship, they brought to some of the most beloved songs that the world knows. The maker of that film, Eddie Tedesco, was Tommy Tedesco, one of those Wrecking Crew member's son, and he made it a quest to kind of tell that story. Now he's telling the story of these four musicians who careers sort of span from late '60s, '70s, '80s, '90s. And they're still playing and on tour and the director... unfortunately, musicians can't be here, but the director is going to be here to talk about the film. And it's just a great documentary. It's one of those just make it as you just, you light up with all these aha moments when you're realizing that you know that these guys were the heart and soul, the beating heart in some of these great songs. You know, working with Linda Ronstadt, the list is just unbelievable. So I'm really excited about that one. We're going to have a DJ, Hunter Lee, who's a amazing archivist and Grammy nominee, he's going to bring some music to the Grand Cinema afterwards. We even have a touring act coming through who's going to play their original score to one of the first horror movies called l' Inferno, which was a silent film, which tracks Dante's descent into hell. They're going to perform in front of that, that we're really excited about that special event. And then closing night is a feature called Fancy Dance, which is a fantastic new talent director named Erica Tremblay and she has directed a wonderful film about a young Indigenous woman whose mother has gone missing. And so it touches on issues of Indigenous women, Indigenous women being kidnapped and disappearing and and sometimes being murdered. And so it's a very serious subject. But the film itself focuses on cultural strength and really has a note of hope. And as well it's a really wonderful film. And that also co-stars Lily Gladstone, who is an incredible actor, who, if you don't know that name now, you will because she's starring in Martin Scorsese's Killers of the Flower Moon. And already there's buzz about possible Best Actress nominations for the Academy. So we're really excited to have that for our closing night film. And we also have quite a few shorts packages that have all kinds of terrific themes and sometimes just dramatic or documentary, but I think the short films are really the beating heart of the Tacoma Film Festival and really of any film festival because those are the films that are detached from too much capital and too much investments. That filmmaker can really stretch their talents in ways that our audience doesn't always see in more commercial films. So we're really excited about that.

CA: How do you package the short films and how was that offset with all of the films in general. You've got four venues in Grand Cinema?

WN: We do, we have four, but we mostly run the Film Festival in two of them.  As far as packaging the short films I guess it's a little bit more art than science.  There are obvious connections as far as dramatic or documentary and things like that. But sometimes we we put them together in a certain theme like we have an environmental climate package. We have a short package that centers on disability and all abilities so there's a short package in connection with that we even have a sports and outdoors package, those come together pretty easily. And then we come up with some sort of oblique threads that sometimes are just kind of fun to do to discover for the audience on their own. Those connections between the films can be a little bit nebulous, but then they are the way you put them together can also reveal something about the films. There can be a dialogue between the short films that you put in the same package. And so that's kind of the fun of it for us as to create a pathway for the viewer that is somewhat surprising and kind of like revealing some little bit of a mystery.

CA: You apparently have a workshop for the filmmakers that are going to appear. Can you tell us about that and any other incentives that you're giving to the filmmakers.

WN: Filmmakers generally come because they want to be part of this community. It's really exciting because we hear from filmmakers, over the years we built up this reputation as just being kind of like the small special, I don't know, the liberal arts college of many film festivals and you know, we are so excited to hear from filmmakers that, oh, I've heard that the Tacoma Film Festival is great. And I've I've met a cinematographer who I worked with at the film festival, you know, so a lot of the benefit is just getting the filmmakers out of their studios and their editing rooms and their projects and getting them together in the same place to have a really warm welcoming environment where they can gather together and share notes.  It's one of those things where when you go to the conference, you're thinking, oh, I'm just going to this conference, but then you can come away with lifelong friends. You can come away with it from your next creative partner. And that's really what we see is the benefit of the way we run the Tacoma Film Festival is we really create an atmosphere where people can exchange ideas about film and see what's see what's out there and share their works with one another. And then the workshop itself is about breaking some of those barriers. You know, I think a lot of people who make films, they struggle making connections because that's just hard for any industry, is making those connections in a natural way. That that builds up, builds up their network, like the those groups of people that you can rely on and call in to help you solve a problem. And that's what that workshop is all about. And we're really excited because we've got Ryan Davis from Smarthouse Creative and Melinda Raebyne, who's a filmmaker. We're going to talk about some of those ways that you can break through the barriers to make your indie film. So that's a benefit we've had. What I'm really excited about when we have those workshops, since we've had filmmakers say, I'm really inspired and we'll hear later that they changed their pitch and they won a big fellowship. And then their film's now distributed by a big distributor like A24 or something like that. And we're just really proud to have been a little tiny part of that person's career and maybe change their pathway a little bit in a way that helps him out.

CA: Let's go from the broad to the specific.  I understand that there's some superlatives that are applied to the Tacoma Film Festival. Give me a couple of those.

WN: Movie Maker magazine is a really great publication for filmmakers. And so we were really proud year after year to be chosen to be One Of The Film Festivals Worth The Money, and then one year we actually were awarded One of the Coolest Film Festivals in the world, which is a huge honor for us. We're also we've also been named One of the Best Film Festivals for New Filmmakers. And so all of those little awards, or I shouldn't say little, those big awards for us. They mean everything to us. And we're really excited to keep that reputation up. 

CA: Any personal notes you have about the film festival? Tell us how Wade came into it and what is your overall experience been, how you feel about it in the overall spectrum of arts manufacture.  How does Wade get involved? I mean, anyone could have talked to us about the Tacoma Film Festival but for some reason they chose Wade.

WN: I was on the board of the Grand Cinema and a job popped up and I said this is what I want to be a part of. I've been with the Grand/Tacoma Film Festival for eight years and we've just worked as a team, shaping it and growing it and changing it little by little to make it more accessible, to make it more creative and to make it a wonderful place for filmmakers to gather and share their works and it's just a thrill every year.

CA: All right, this has been Wade Neal with Grand Cinema for the Tacoma Film Festival. And for more information?

WN: Go to 'TacomaFilmFestival.com'

(edited for print, originally broadcast on KTAH-FM)