Let the marathon begin! The premise of today’s marathon screening is that no one who was rejected from the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival this year is denied screen time for at least one of their works. Admission is free for the entire 9 hours of films. Here we stand, here we screen. What was once a solitary experience of rejection has become, through a funny faux pas, a building of community.
A few months ago I received another rejection from a film festival via email. This particular letter, from the Milwaukee Underground Film Festival (M.U.F.F.), like most of the others, was a generic stock-email. The kind whose cut-copy-paste, all-too-familiar template phrasing made one’s heart preemptively sink, not having read the lines we’ve all read too many times, but already knowing what they will say.
But there is the funny bit to the otherwise-familiar story. To read this email, I had to scroll… and scroll… and scroll… down what seemed to be over a hundred CC’d email names that were listed in the same message. Here for all to see, in a list for all to see, were my peers, my mentors, my friends, those whose work I’ve seen and loved, or was just becoming familiar with. Here, in CC list form, was a group of like-minded people, all getting rejected from the same festival.
In a slightly impulsive and facetious moment, I REPLIED ALL (except of course, deleting the sender’s email from this list) and suggested, for all of us who weren’t given the courtesy of a BCC private rejection, to screen the works here at The Picture Show. This sparked off an email-thread of filmmakers writing and responding to each other. The thread became, as Anna Swanson would later write: “what community looks like.”
Featuring works by Rich Fedorchak, Charles Andre Coderre, Gloria Chung, Isaac Sherman, Sasha Waters Freyer, Maeve Jackson, and many, many more.
July 13, 1 pm – 1am
The Picture Show
226 Green Street, Brooklyn
Free Free Free All Day!
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