 "Photo: Elizabeth Miller / UCD Advocate")
A film festival can accomplish many things. It can pack hotel rooms with filmmakers from across the country and line film lovers up out the doors of movie theatres for days on end, all the while entertaining and informing audiences.
Britta Erickson, festival director for the annual Starz Denver Film Festival, said, “A film festival is an 11-day period when you can sit back in your chair and travel to all these different places in the world.”
Erickson starts mapping out that journey in January, and spends most of her year planning the festival, which drew 42,000 attendees last year. Her staff swells from 10 year-round employees to about 100 close to the November opening night, with an additional 300 volunteers providing support without which, she said, the festival couldn’t happen.
According to Brit Withey, artistic director for the Denver Film Society, the call for entries, which runs from February through July, gets 1,300 films. The festival will show 400 of them. Narrowing that selection down takes a team of people, including Withey.
Theatres run close to capacity showing films that, Withey said, may have no opportunity to be seen other than at festivals. Shows sell out.
And this year, it might not have happened.
Over the summer, the festival and the Denver Film Society had to deal with what Erickson called a “bit of bad casting.” A new executive director had come into the organization, and he just wasn’t the right fit, Erickson said.
At the time, rumors circulated online about the end of the film society and the festival.
“From an economic side of things, I knew we’d be able to make it through,” Erickson said. “It could have been gone, but I don’t think the community and the people would have let that happen. But it might have been quite different.”
So, Bo Smith, the executive director, was asked to step down. And Tom Botelho, a long-time board member, stepped into the position. Erickson described him, in an emailed comment, as having the organization pointed in the right direction financially, and said the rest of the staff has focused, re-energized, and put together another world-class film program for this year’s festival.
Which is good, local filmmakers say.
Adam Taub—a Boulder-based documentary filmmaker whose film, The Duke of Bachata, will screen during the festival—said community has been critical to his development as a filmmaker, and the film society and film festival are key parts of that community.
“It’s a great film festival and a very important film festival, so I was really excited just to be accepted,” he said. “To be able to premiere [my film] at that festival is really exciting, and to have it in my home state and to get to invite all my friends and family is really exciting as well.”
Taub’s film is about a bachata and merengue musican, and Taub is active in those communities as well. Screening the film in Denver allows his friends from the Latin music scene in Boulder and Denver to be some of the first to see it.
He said he’s also heard a lot of programmers from other festivals attend the Denver Film Festival and keep an eye out for films to pick up.
“It’s kind of my hope as well that Denver can be a good jumping off point for other festival screenings,” he said.
He’d prefer to live in Colorado, he said, and travel for his projects, and the better the community here, the easier it is for him to continue using Colorado as his base.
“I’m constantly calling different people, trying to get advice—whether it’s on cameras or getting different filmmakers to watch a rough cut and get feedback on that,” he said. “It helps on all aspects to have people around in the area.”
Benjamin Garst, who is completing a B.F.A. in film at UC Denver, will see one of his short films shown at the film festival this year. It’s his second film to screen during the Denver Film Festival. Garst started getting involved with the film society as soon as he started at UCD, and said his time there has allowed him to have conversations with people at the society about their insights on filmmaking in Colorado, learn about how films are selected for the film center, and interact with other filmmakers.
“Knowing that there was something here and knowing that I could do film here in Colorado definitely helped me be confident about making my films and putting a lot of energy into the films that I make,” he said. “I don’t have to leave and go out to L.A. or New York or whatever. There’s plenty of resources or means to thrive as a filmmaker here in Colorado.”
The time and passion that people at the film center put into the society and the festival has also served as a model for him.
“Their insights and just being around that type of energy has definitely contributed to how I try to approach making films,” he said. “Knowing how determined they are and that something of that caliber takes that much devotion definitely plays into my mentality of how to make a film. It’s really inspirational in a lot of ways.”
He was volunteering for the film center shortly before the executive director’s departure, and said when he heard about it, one of his first fears was that the society and the festival would disappear.
“I remember feeling kind of devastated because I’ve always thought what they do over there is awesome,” he said.
But things turned around quickly. Which is good, he said, because even though the people from the society might have carried their devotion for film to a new organization, losing the venue of the Starz film center would have shut down a film center that has in some ways become a year-round film festival.
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