Regional Film Festivals Impact the Oscars, Too

This time of year, major fall festivals give way to regional fests around the country, which program a mix of Oscar contenders and international Oscar submissions. The better-resourced festivals bring in talent to regale the Academy members on hand, from the Hamptons and Woodstock to Middleburg and Savannah. And at this year’s BendFilm Festival in Oregon, ex-Sundance festival director John Cooper launched the inaugural BendFilm: Basecamp.

Filmmakers and their casts did not make the trek to the Orcas Island Film Festival (October 16-20), which has built up a passionate following over 10 years. Coaxing distributors to send them DCPs is Carl Spence, veteran of the Seattle, Palm Springs, Miami, and Sonoma fests, who runs Orcas Island with local culture impresario Donna Laslo. It was fun taking the puddle jumper from Seattle to Orcas Island (about 40 minutes away) and driving over to Moran State Park on a chilly rainy day. “It was the wettest and most blustery edition in our history,” wrote Spence in an email.

The duo assembled a selection of 40 of the top festival circuit breakouts, Oscar submissions, and contenders. The lineup includes 31 feature films, eight documentaries, two animated features and one short film, representing more than 20 countries, including nine international Oscar entries, from Norway’s Cannes breakout “Armand,” starring Renate Reinsve, to Jacques Audiard’s musical “Emilia Pérez,” and Italy’s “Vermiglio.”

Spence invited some folks in for an industry veterans panel, moderated by Cooper, including producer Christine Vachon, Picturehouse’s Bob and Jeanne Berney, who accompanied the eventual documentary audience award winner “Porcelain War” (which also won that prize at Woodstock), Cooper, and Strand Releasing’s Marcus Hu, who has enjoyed a long and productive relationship with Gregg Araki since the launch of their respective careers with “The Living End.”

Orcas gives out two audience awards plus the $10,000 cash prize for the Jean-Marc Vallée Vanguard Award, listed below.

‘Porcelain War’Courtesy of Finch No Worries

Audience Award for Best Documentary:
“Porcelain War”
Directors Brendan Bellomo and Slava Leontyev | USA

Runner-up: “UnBroken,” Director Beth Lane | USA

Audience Award for Best Feature:
“The Seed of the Sacred Fig”
Director Mohammad Rasoulof | Iran

Runner-up: “Flow,” Director Gints Zilbalodis | Latvia

2024 Jean-Marc Vallée Vanguard Award
$10,000 unrestricted Cash Grant
Director Louise Courvoisier, “Holy Cow” | France

And I interviewed Killer Films producer Vachon, who earned her first Best Picture nomination for “Past Lives” after producing over 125 films. She’s more upbeat about the industry springing back to some new normal than many, after the vicissitudes of the pandemic and strikes, even if more productions are shooting overseas. She said, “Out of disruption comes opportunity, and there’s still opportunities that we have in mind that will come out of this current disruption. That said, one of the worst things that happened in the strikes was a lot of people did leave the business.”

This year marked BendFilm’s inaugural Basecamp, three days of a mentorship retreat assembled by Cooper, who has been consulting with the festival, helping to bring in talent. When the festival landed a grant from the Murdoch Foundation, Cooper had pitched wanting to educate some of the many young filmmakers coming up who don’t know the realities of navigating the entertainment business. “We thought, let’s bring in 10 mentors and 40 fellows, and we do some heavy-duty stuff like contracts and finance, and how do you get an agent?” he told me en route to Orcas Island.

On the ground at the Orcas Island Film FestivalAnne Thompson

Cooper invited an open submission that yielded some 160 applicants, which he and BendFilm director of education Clay Pruitt culled down to the final 41. They brought into the Caldera facility outside of Bend filmmakers Bing Liu, Guinevere Turner, and Sydney Freeland, power agent Craig Kestel, and industry expert Kevin Iwashina, acquisitions executive Ayo Kepher-Maat, and producers Cassian Elwes, Effie Brown, and Vachon for the Bendfilm workshops. With no press around, “everyone was very candid,” said Cooper, who hopes to build on the success of this first round to do more.

The first-ever Basecamp Fellows are: Leo Aguirre, Megan Alan, Fernando Andrés, Briana N. Cox, Roberta Cumbianchera, Caroline Creaghead, Stacey Davis, Maria del Mar Rosario Ruiz, Mylissa Fitzsimmons, Erin Galey, Joy Jorgensen, Jeff Kardesch, Johnny Kirk, João Henrique Kurtz, Philip Lauri, Elizabeth Leiter, Kat Lo, Ann Lupo, Chaconne Martin-Berkowicz, Tanner Matthews, Kara Grace Miller, Amelia Moses, Rex New, Hanh Nguyen, Heather Older, Joe Peeler, Jonathan Pickett, Raúl A. Rodríguez, Ella May Sahlman, Joseph Sackett, Keegan Sentner, Jessie Sears, Destinee Stewart, Alexander Spiess, Isaac Trimble, Aaron C. Wong, Andrew Wonder, Veronica Wood, and Alex Bijan Zandi.