Crowds flocked to the Milwaukee Film Festival again this year to view work from international and national filmmakers. But this year’s festival, which wrapped up Thursday, proved once again that one of the more popular and important screenings is The Milwaukee Show, which delivered to audiences short films courtesy of the city’s thriving local artistic community.
The festival presented a collection of short films with a diversity of style and perspectives at The Milwaukee Show, which took place on two days at the Oriental Theatre. The sessions, always one of the Milwaukee Film Festival’s hottest tickets, offered a rare chance to experience the work of the city’s best and brightest filmmakers.
The year’s Milwaukee Show film lineup included: ASPIRE, Healing Hens, The Last Lordship, Letter to the Captain, Lincoln National, Night Collections #1, Once a Mormon and A Sweetness of Lapse.
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Lincoln National is the first film for director Lee Odeja. It focuses on the unique cultural aspects of the Lincoln Park golf course on the Glendale-Milwaukee border.
“It’s about a Midwestern golf course that teaches us about community, and it’s very little about sports,” Odeja said. “The film showcases the best parts of Lincoln Park, which are the landscape itself and the authenticity of the people that patronized the place.”
In developing the film, Odeja would often arrive at the Lincoln Park course as early as 3 a.m. to gather with grounds crew members, who serve as narrators of sorts for the film. “It’s a participatory documentary,” he said.
Among those featured in the film is a trio of brothers from Milwaukee’s Sherman Park neighborhood who have been golfing at Lincoln for about 50 years. “I met them on the course,” Odeja said.
The film also features members of We Black We Golf, a social organization that uses golf to improve personal and professional development through networking and philanthropy. Lincoln Park is a home base for the group.
“It’s my first formal film,” Odeja said. “I produced, directed, shot and edited it and played all kinds of one-man-band roles in it.”
Although it’s the first endeavor of this type for Odeja, he’s been involved in filmmaking for more than 20 years and leads the in-house creative team at Northwestern Mutual Life Insurance Co.
“We do a lot of documentaries on clients’ stories,” said Odeja, a graduate of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee and an East Side resident. “I’ve always considered myself a filmmaker and I’ve always considered myself an artist in that medium. Then, all of a sudden, I woke up and I’m 40 years old and I haven’t really done anything for myself. It was important for me to do this.”
The Milwaukee Show is important in showcasing local talent that otherwise often flies under the radar, he said.
“It was a lot of fun seeing hometown filmmakers and then seeing my film being screened,” Odeja said. “From what I understood, there were hundreds of hours of submissions for The Milwaukee Show itself, and to only have a few films shown, I was pretty honored by that. It’s great to have a hometown festival and the hometown crowds and getting to see my peers and their impressive work.”
Odeja said his initial goal was simply to make the film and hopefully have it be chosen for The Milwaukee Show. He’s submitted Lincoln National to a few other regional and statewide festivals, as well as larger national ones.
“I wanted to at least give it a shot,” he said. “I think I’ll also do some sort of digital release at some point, too.”
The Milwaukee Show remains an important platform for local filmmakers, Odeja said. “You feel part of the festival and just as involved as everyone else,” he said. “It’s critical that it continues to inspire me, who is 40 and making his first film, but also all these younger people who are in the show. To have your films screened at these fabulous movie houses is amazing.”
For director Ryan Allsop, this year’s Milwaukee Film Festival marked a return to the Milwaukee Show.
“It’s always great. I had a film shown at the Milwaukee Show two years ago, too,” Allsop said. “I always love to see the incredibly talented artists and creatives in this community. Often, I know it’s hard to spotlight or see the local artists that we have here. I think it’s amazing that they have the Milwaukee Show, where they spotlight us. This is our talent and these creative people who are your neighbors and co-workers that are just down the road. It’s a great way to showcase what we are capable of making here in the city of Milwaukee.”
Having one of the Milwaukee Show screenings land on April 14, or Milwaukee Day, made it all the more special, Allsop said. “We were able to celebrate being prideful of the city we live in and showing off all the amazing talent that we have here at the same time” he said.
Allsop’s film Once a Mormon was part of this year’s Milwaukee Show screenings.
“It’s a short film that I’ve been working on for a while. It wrote it with the idea of it being a TV series as well as a short film,” he said. “It’s about two Mormon missionaries. It’s a drama mixed with a bunch of hijinks and laugh out loud dark comedy. I wanted it to be about what would make a missionary question his reality and his identity.”
A native of Eau Claire, Allsop was raised in Mormon family and briefly attended Brigham Young University in Provo, Utah. He’d eventually leave the Mormon faith and finish his schooling at the UW-Milwaukee’s film program.
“This film started as a thought about what would it have been like if I had gone on my mandatory two-year Mormon mission,” he said. “I just went down a rabbit hole as a filmmaker. I just kept exaggerating and it kept snowballing into a larger story.”
Looking to add acting talent to the project, Allsop reached out to Richard Karn, an actor and game show host best known for his role as Al Borland in the popular ABC series “Home Improvement.”
“I swung for the fences,” Allsop said. “I reached out to Richard and I sent him the script, totally out of the blue. Never met him before. He loved it. I was able to attach him to the script as a lead actor. He loved it so much that he’s actually the executive producer on the series.”
Allsop flew Karn to Wisconsin for filming in Caledonia. “It was awesome working with him. He’s a total professional. Hilarious guy,” Allsop said. “I wanted him to be a different character than how everyone knows him. He’s a rural hillbilly on the fringe of society. I had him grow out a huge beard. He embraced it. You won’t recognize him from his most famous role. I wanted him to have this new identity.”
Karn’s involvement has allowed Allsop to recruit more talent and producers to the project. “We’re continuing to develop the series and package it and we’re getting near the point where we’ll start pitching it to streaming services with the hopes that they’ll love it and give it the green light and order a full season.”
Taking chances has been the hallmark of the development of Once a Mormon, Allsop said. “This whole project has been about no limits and just going for it. Shoot for the moon and see what happens,” he said. “If someone green lights it, maybe we can film it in Milwaukee. That would be amazing.”
Allsop, who is 33 and lives in Waukesha with his wife and one-year-old child, performs cinematography for various ad agencies in the area and has produced several films. He had success with an earlier film, Mount Liptak: A Little Lie in a Big War, about Allsop’s uncle, Lester Liptak, who served underage in World War II. The movie was filmed in and around Milwaukee.
He also wrote and directed Down We Go, which he described as a “skiing comedy drama” that was filmed during the COVID-19 pandemic at Granite Peak in Wausau.
“My dream is to one day turn this into a full-time profession,” he said.
