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Cedar Rapids Independent Film Festival runs gamut of styles
All selections, student to pro-am and professional, have an Iowa tie
Diana Nollen
Mar. 28, 2024 6:00 am, Updated: Mar. 28, 2024 10:36 am
One film was shot in the director’s apartment. Another took five years to film all eight of its episodes, chained into one work.
Histories, mysteries, comedies, dramas, documentaries, professionals, students, collaborations, two minutes to two hours — all have a common bond. And all will be showcased during the Cedar Rapids Independent Film Festival held April 5 to 7 at Collins Road Theatres, across from Lindale Mall.
As it was in the beginning, every work being screened at the festival has an Iowa tie. Some were filmed in Iowa, others were made by current or former Iowans, many feature Iowa actors, and many have Iowans working behind the scenes.
That’s what’s kept this film festival ticking since 2001, in an ever-evolving filmmakers’ field of dreams with more and more festivals popping up in Iowa and across the Midwest.
If you go
What: Cedar Rapids Independent Film Festival
Where: Collins Road Theatres, 1462 Twixt Town Rd., Marion
When: April 5 to 7, 2024
Times: Friday: 12:20 p.m. to final Q&A at 10:21 p.m.; Saturday: 9 a.m. to the Eddy Awards ceremony at 9:30 p.m.; Student Cinema Sunday: 1 p.m. to awards at 5:15 p.m.
Tickets: Adults, full session, $35 advance, $45 after April 4; students, $25 advance, $35 after April 4; single sessions vary from $5 to $12; crifm.org/2024-festival/tickets/
Details: crifm.org/
“It’s interesting, because you might think that requiring an Iowa connection would seriously limit your ability to bring in films, but there are people with Iowa connections working in the film industry all around the world,” Eric Dean Freese of Marion, the festival’s executive director, told The Gazette. “So we’ve never had a problem bringing in films from places other than Eastern Iowa or Iowa.
“We celebrate the fact that there are people with ties to Iowa working everywhere, and it’s pretty easy to find your Iowa connection. … We like to tell filmmakers who are skeptics that if they don’t think their film qualifies, ask around on-set because you might just have an Iowan standing next to you.”
Freese is pleased and surprised by the number of films vying for a slot in the festival, which has grown into a five-figure event to stage. After a two-year pandemic pause, the festival returned in 2022, screening the entries chosen for 2020. So when 99 films were submitted for 2023, Freese figured filmmakers had stockpiled their work produced over the shutdown, and numbers would be lower for 2024.
Wrong. The numbers were up, with 102 submissions. The festival responded, increasing from 51 selected for screening in 2023 to 57 chosen for 2024.
“I think we’re in the middle of a renaissance,” he said, noting the uptick. “There are so many amazing filmmakers in Iowa, and the Midwest in general, that are just cranking out great work (in) short films and feature films and documentaries. It’s just cool.”
He’s seeing filmmaking pockets across the state, including the Quad Cities, Eastern Iowa and the Cedar Valley, adding, “There’s some out in the western side of the state that are just going like gangbusters, doing fantastic work.”
Across social media and in conversions with other filmmakers, he’s also seeing “amazing collaborative work” between production companies.
‘Friendly Faces’
One of the year’s biggest collaborations brings many friendly faces from the Corridor theater scene to “Friendly Faces.” It’s an eight-episode web comedy starring Mic Evans and Landon Sheetz as a duo operating a rent-a-friend business. Various residents of Harmony hire them to go on different escapades.
One person wants them to go on a double date with him and his ghost girlfriend; an empty-nester wants them to go with her for a wild night on the town; yet another vignette finds them taking a client’s corpse out for one last night on the town.
Each episode has a different director, beginning with creator/writer/producer Keaton Fuller, 30, of Cedar Rapids. He started the project in 2019, shot a few episodes, shut down for the pandemic, then picked it up again. The pilot aired at the 2022 festival, and Fuller is happy to be bringing the finished project to this year’s lineup.
He began writing the story in 2018, as a way to stay creative after studying film at the University of Iowa, graduating in 2016. He showed the script to some friends, and their positive reactions gave him the push he needed. He started rounding up actors and directors, and filmed five episodes from the summer of 2019 through February 2020.
He self-financed the project, investing between $15,000 and $20,000 for production costs.
“That was a decision that I made at 25 that I don’t know if I would do now,” he said. “I am happy with how it turned out — it was just a lot of work and smart financial planning.”
For the nearly 100 people involved in front of the camera and behind the scenes, he relied on the “goodwill for people who really believed in the show and wanted to be a part of it,” he said. “I was upfront with that fact right out of the gate, and people still wanted to be involved.”
Evans, 30, of Cedar Rapids, is a familiar face on area stages, including the title roles for “The Hunchback of Notre Dame” and “The SpongeBob Musical” at Theatre Cedar Rapids. But this is his first film role, opening new doors for his acting acumen.
Fuller reached out to him after seeing him in “Significant Other” at Giving Tree Theater in Marion in 2018.
“I read one episode and said, ‘Yeah, I’m in,’ ” stepping into Ollie’s shoes in the pilot, on through the entire series.
“He sets up his whole shtick where he’s a lonely human who decides to create a rent-a-friend service,” Evans noted. “I liked how authentic the character was. I liked that he was funny, but also heartfelt, so I got to play my whole gambit of my acting characters that I like to play. And it mirrored myself. He’s a queer man. It wasn’t shying away from LGBTQ issues, but in a humorous way that fits my sense of humor and my style, as well.”
The pandemic pause presented interesting challenges for Evans and the screenplay.
Stepping into the role after a two-year hiatus was “a daunting task,” he said, but Fuller gave him some clips of the previous episodes, to let him give some continuity to the character.
One thing that couldn’t be ignored was his physical transformation.
“I had a relatively large weight loss in between 2020 into 2022,” he said, “so we actually had a plot point written in that talks about how my weight fluctuates. And it’s a dark comedy humor, so a lot of the things we can play off pretty well. Things like if I had a tapeworm, it wouldn’t have been out of left field. I think it ended up being a genetic condition, because my mom ate hair while I was in the womb — or something silly like that.”
A new episode was “completely written around” body image, he said. The inherent pandemic loneliness also gave him — and Fuller — new insights into the characters renting a friend, as well as to the two main characters who are lonely, too.
Making the leap from stage to film acting was a learning experience for Evans, who was grateful for the tips from others used to the more subtle nuances of acting in front of a camera, instead of projecting your character to the back of a large theater.
“It’s a great exploration in your art and your craft,” he said. “I highly recommend if you're a film actor to audition for a play, if you’re a play actor, audition for a film and try that different medium out, because it makes you stretch your muscles a little bit.”
Festival
Fuller can’t wait to see the entire project screened at the festival — not just once, but twice.
“It’s a really unique opportunity to screen the show in its entirety, both for local people who are directly involved, and we’re able to share it with our community at large,” he said, adding that it’s one of those rare festivals that will screen the entire two hours.
Using the festival’s acronym, he said, “CRIFF is incredibly thoughtful in how it really tries to cultivate a good film community here in Iowa. And so they have the entire thing screening in full, no cuts, two times, which is just an incredible gift.”
The ability to see their films on a big screen in a theatrical setting is another gift for the filmmakers.
“Now, of course, there are umpteen streaming services out there where you can watch any kind of film,” festival director Freese said. “But you’re still looking at it on a laptop or on your TV or your iPad in your living room. It’s not the same.
“It’s that experience of sitting in a theater, where people are laughing when they’re supposed to laugh, crying when they’re supposed to cry, screaming when they’re supposed to scream,” he said.
The Q&A sessions afterward give filmmakers a one-on-one interaction they can’t get anywhere else, along with giving audiences a peek behind the scenes at the process. Networking is a big plus, Freese said, as is the reception everyone gets at Collins Road Theatres, heightened by the lobby space available for information tables and just milling about.
The festival moved there in 2004, Freese said, “and we have had no interest in looking anywhere else. It’s just a perfect fit.”
Comments: (319) 368-8508; diana.nollen@thegazette.com