The Last of the Red Hot Filmmaker Tours

 

During one of the general sessions at the 2007 NAMAC Conference in Austin, Texas, a discussion emerged lamenting the disappearance of organized tours for independent media artists. While there are numerous touring film festivals and film programs throughout the country—such as the Black Maria Film Festival, Microcinema International’s Independent Exposure, and the Media That Matters Film Festival, to name just a few—none of them bring the filmmakers into communities to screen their works and engage audiences.

While the ranks of organized filmmaker tours may have decreased drastically over the years, the Southern Circuit Tour of Independent Filmmakers remains. This model program leverages the resources of many partners to bring independent media artists into communities with limited access to undistributed works.

A Brief History
The South Carolina Arts Commission created the Southern Circuit as a statewide touring program for independent filmmakers in 1975, when the agency sent media artist David Boatwright to screen his work in three South Carolina communities. After the success of this pilot, Southern Circuit blossomed into a touring program bringing a new roster of filmmakers to the state each year.

As its popularity grew, Southern Circuit became a multi-state program in 1978, when sites in Georgia and Mississippi were added to the tour. Numerous venues from states outside of the immediate region began applying to become host organizations for the tour, including the Southwest Alternate Media Project (Houston), Webster University (St. Louis), the Mid-Atlantic Arts Foundation (Baltimore), and many others. By 1981, more than half of the sites hosting the tour each year were located outside of South Carolina.

According to Susan Leonard, director of the South Carolina Arts Commission’s Media Arts Center and former director of the tour, “The core of Southern Circuit is very human, personal, conversational… It has provided a way for filmmakers to really be a part of their audience and have a dialogue.” Since its inception, Southern Circuit has provided this opportunity to more than 200 media artists, screening their works for 44 communities in 12 states throughout the Southeast. Some of the notable filmmakers who have participated are Barbara Hammer (Resisting Paradise), Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha), Charles Burnett (Killer of Sheep), Nina Davenport (Always a Bridesmaid), Jay Craven (Disappearances), and Cathy Lee Crane (Unoccupied Zone).

In 2005, the South Carolina Arts Commission approached the Southern Arts Federation (SAF) with a proposal to transfer the development and management of the Southern Circuit tour to SAF. At the precipice of realigning its programmatic focus, the Commission decided to find a new home for Southern Circuit rather than to discontinue it after 30 years. With its financial support of Southern Circuit in the early years, combined with its mandate to promote and support the arts in the southeastern United States, the Southern Arts Federation seemed like a proper fit. The Federation agreed and adopted Southern Circuit in July of 2006.

The Transition
With an eye toward areas for growth and evolution, SAF entered into a multi-phased analysis of Southern Circuit’s design. In the first phase of the analysis, SAF engaged the South Carolina Arts Commission in a discussion of the Circuit’s challenges as well as its successes. While audience members reported a highly positive response to the depth and intimacy of their interactions with the touring artists, the actual audience numbers had dwindled in recent years. The Commission also reported that a number of host organizations requested an expansion of centralized marketing assistance for Southern Circuit. While the independent theaters hosting the tour had existing marketing strategies for their programming, other host organizations had little or no marketing budget, strategies, or experience.

SAF received this feedback as it was preparing to launch its first Southern Circuit tour and responded by immediately establishing an online area for promotional materials. Here, host organizations and the press could download sample press releases, high resolution images, “hook” sheets with story ideas for the media, audio interviews with the filmmakers, as well as tour posters and fliers for distribution in the local communities. In an effort to further raise the visibility of the Circuit and engage its audience, SAF also established a blog featuring posts entered by the filmmakers while on tour. This kind of new media support provided the tools for host organizations to promote the program and encourage their audiences to seek out more information about the films and filmmakers before and after the screenings.

For the second phase of programmatic analysis, SAF combed through Southern Circuit’s history to identify areas that needed to be reworked to align with their mission and goals. During this inquiry, SAF discovered three areas for restructuring: number of communities served annually, geographic distribution of the host cities, and involvement of filmmakers living and working in the Southeast. To assist in identifying possibilities for these areas, SAF convened a task force—composed of filmmakers, representatives from tour venues, media arts professionals, and SAF staff—which led to a number of changes present in the program’s current design.

The Current Design
The next Southern Circuit will send out two parallel tours, each with six filmmakers and their films traveling to ten sites, for a total of 120 screenings from September 2008-May 2009. The 20 organizations hosting the tour are located throughout eight Southeastern states.

Southern Circuit is committed to recruiting quality independent films that generate thought and discussion. SAF promotes the call for entries through their website, email blasts to filmmakers and film organizations, promotional services provided by Withoutabox.com, and contact with media artists at film festivals and professional conferences. Filmmakers submit feature-length films or a series of shorts exceeding 45 minutes in the categories of documentary, fiction, experimental, and animation. Applicants are required to have a valid driver’s license and must reside in the United States.

Filmmakers and their films are selected to participate in Southern Circuit through a rigorous two-phase process. In phase one, local prescreening teams view all of the submitted films in their entirety, complete evaluation forms, and recommend films to advance to the next round. In phase two, representatives identified by participating venues from each host community convene in Atlanta for a three-day selection meeting. They view segments from and evaluate each of the top 40 films recommended by the prescreening teams. Once all 40 films have been viewed and scored by the panel, the films are ranked from highest to lowest score. At this point in the process, the representatives are grouped according to their respective tours. The two groups alternate selecting films until each tour has selected six films and three alternates.

Selected filmmakers travel to ten communities throughout the South to screen their films. Each screening includes an introduction by the filmmaker, a Q & A with the filmmaker following the film, and a social event that gives audience members an opportunity for personal interaction with the filmmaker. Filmmakers receive an honorarium for each screening on the tour. In addition, Southern Circuit covers all travel expenses for filmmakers, including airfare, car rental, as well as a per diem for food and lodging.

The filmmakers and films included in the 2008-2009 tour are: Mohammed Naqvi with Shame, Adrian Belic with Beyond the Call, Ben Russell with The Wet Season, Antonio Brown and Stewart Wade with Tru Loved, Victor Zimet and Stephanie Silber with Random Lunacy: Videos from the Road Less Traveled, Rachel Goslins with ’Bama Girl, Jed Riffe with Ripe for Change, Aprill Winney with Counting Backwards, Scott Chamberlin-Hoyt with The Meaning of Tea, Phoebe Ferguson with Member of the Club: A New Orleans Cinderella Story, Michael and Christine Swanson with All About Us, and Scott Galloway with A Man Named Pearl.

As Southern Circuit grows, SAF faces new challenges that may require further restructuring the tour to bring increasingly sophisticated content to established independent film audiences in the South, while providing programming appropriate for new audiences in communities that are engaging independent film for the first time.

The Impact of the Circuit: Filmmakers, Communities, Partners
Southern Circuit is unique among touring film programs. The direct interaction between audience members and visiting filmmakers creates a remarkable experience for participants in host communities. According to Mobile Arts Council’s Charlie Smoke, in Mobile, Alabama, “The program has provided a focus for those interested in and/or involved in film—connecting people who would never have met, exposing them to work they would not otherwise have seen, allowing them to meet working filmmakers, expanding their awareness of the possibilities of film, and elevating the level of discussion.”

Interacting with regional audiences before and after the screening of their films is an invaluable process for filmmakers as well. “Traveling on the circuit has really brought home the fact that there are people who will go to extraordinary lengths to support low budget independent filmmaking,” comments director Jim Haverkamp. “The fact that people will take a risk and come to see movies by people they’ve never heard of, about all kinds of strange subject matter, is astounding. Getting to talk to people after the show is probably the best part of the tour...What a luxury that is for a small filmmaker, and what a shot in the arm.”

Because the program provides regional screenings in communities that usually would not have another opportunity to see these exceptional independent films, Southern Circuit offers a valuable benefit to those who seek to bring thought-provoking content to their audiences. Elizabeth Heffelfinger of Western Carolina University in Cullowhee, North Carolina, explains, “To bring [Southern Circuit] to our campus offers a much-needed cultural experience to the part of our rural population that is cut off from such experiences by social and economic considerations, like rising gas prices.”

As filmmakers learn more about how audiences from a variety of perspectives and backgrounds view their films, their impression of these communities, their work, and the industry often comes into clearer focus. David Redmon, director of Kamp Katrina, writes on the Southern Circuit blog, “I think it’s realistic to describe me and Ashley [Sabin] as ‘dependent’ filmmakers as opposed to ‘independent’ filmmakers. In truth, no one does it alone. We (and other filmmakers) are dependent on organizations to secure screening venues, and on people who raise money to show Kamp Katrina (and our other films), fly us in for workshops or Q&A, donate their time and energy for feedback, provide finishing, startup funds or stipends, create an audience, and offer a much needed social and psychological support network for everyone involved in the complicated world of documentary storytelling.”

Finally, offering a pithy reflection on his Southern Circuit experience, Roger Beebe writes, “The audiences were really interesting—definitely more diverse than the ones I’ve seen on my own tours; often challenging in ways I hadn’t anticipated. I’m really heartened to discover the potential that exists in all of these cities that I’ve never visited before (and the few that I have), and I just hope that the crowds will keep coming back.”

As long as Southern Circuit exists, independent film will continue to have an interpersonal presence in large and small communities throughout the South, and independent filmmakers will have a unique opportunity to take their films on the road and engage with audiences throughout the region. While Southern Circuit may be the only tour of independent filmmakers in the U.S., its programmatic model could easily be replicated in other regions of the country.

 

Download the podcast here ---> http://podcast.southarts.org/SAFEpisode38.mp3

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ALLEN BELL is program director for Contemporary Arts and New Initiatives at the Southern Arts Federation, where he manages Southern Circuit, Short Circuit, and Operation Homecoming.

DAVID DOMBROSKY, executive director of Carnegie Mellon’s Center for Arts Management and Technology and a NAMAC board member, guided the transition of Southern Circuit during his tenure at SAF.