The 5th incarnation features an organic, family-oriented event that highlights the rich talent of the area.
By Melonie Magruder / Special to The Malibu Times
The 5th (semi) annual Topanga Film Festival takes place Aug. 6 through 9, and this homegrown local event promises to be as comfortably idiosyncratic as one would expect from an outdoor film festival that was originally staged in the founder’s backyard.
A few years ago, in a build-it-and-they-will-come moment, Topanga residents Sara and Urs Baur decided to launch a local film festival, featuring the work of local artists, and invite friends and neighbors to participate.
“The first year, we were deliberately vague about when and where the film festival was going to take place,” Swiss-born filmmaker and advertising designer Urs said in an interview with The Malibu Times. “We didn’t actually have any films to screen or a place to do it. But, people just started to send in their movies, so we set up screenings in our backyard.”
Since then, the Baurs, who met as students at the Art Center College of Design in Pasadena, have expanded their festival, moving screenings to the Topanga Community House ball field or local restaurants and introducing workshops heavy with emphasis on the writing process.
They skipped mounting a festival last year (“It was just too much work,” Urs said). But the slowed economy this year found Urs with time on his hands to reintroduce an international slate of films, competing for the Coyote Award.
Submissions drew heavily on short films, a more readily affordable format to produce than feature-length works, but no less demanding in terms of production quality or creating a story arc. Some even believe short films are harder to achieve artistically.
“Short films are comparable to a haiku form of poetry, rather than a novel,” screenwriter Robert M. Fisher, who helped organize one of the festival screenwriting workshops, said. “You need a beginning, a middle and an end, told in less than 30 minutes. So there are tight demands. And many short films go on to become feature films (like last year’s Oscar-nominated “Frozen River”), so a short film script must be fully developed from the top.”
Fisher partners with workshop presenter Jeffrey Gordon, founder of Writers Boot Camp. He said film festivals are a great venue for promoting the art of film and allowing budding filmmakers the chance to see how an audience responds to their work.
“If you’re new in Hollywood, contrary to popular belief, doors can be opened for you,” Fisher said. “But if your material is not ready, those doors snap shut. So the Writers Boot Camp really empowers the rewrite process. We teach people how to write while they are writing, in real conceptual development.”
Jesse Gordon (no relation to Jeffrey) is screening a chapter from his HBO/Cinemax comedy series, “1000 Words (or less),” a series whose short format relies heavily on an interview presentation that tackles seemingly mundane subjects.
“We’re screening ‘A Conversation With Brandon Johnson’ about how easy it is to stereotype an African American,” Gordon said, who shot the series in high definition video. “I’m a big believer in local film festivals. There is so much talent around here and you get to see what really works in a crowd situation. And what fails.”
Mai and Kim Spurlock are filmmaker sisters who are screening their short film, “Down in the Number 5,” about an aging coal miner who continues debilitating work in the mines to support his son who has Down syndrome.
“Our dad is from West Virginia and my grandparents owned a general store in this small Appalachian town,” Mai said. “My sister used this film as her thesis for her master’s degree from NYU and won the Wendy Wasserman prize. Short films are great because you learn to really compress a story to its essential elements.”
In addition to writing workshops and story panels, live music, DJ’d dance music, open bars and vegetarian soul food, the festival will also offer a screening of Project Butterfly’s documentary, “What About Me?”
In this film, Grammy-nominated creators Jamie Catto and Duncan Bridgeman traveled around the world to interview musicians and philosophers, exploring the complexities of global human nature through music.
“This is a real interesting film,” Baur said. “If you can get Noam Chomsky (political dissident and libertarian socialist) in the same project with Michael Stipe (lead singer for the rock band R.E.M.) and Ram Dass (spiritual leader and compatriot of LSD guru Timothy Leary), you’ve got a challenging piece of work.”
The festival also features a Youth Salon on Aug. 9 screening works by filmmakers under the age of 17. The awards ceremony (the grand prize winner receives a $15,000 camera rental package) will take place that afternoon with the Best of Topanga screening that evening.
“Like Telluride and Sundance, we’d like to think of the Topanga Film Festival as a ‘destination’ festival,” Baur said. “We’re an organic, very family-oriented local event that highlights our rich talent. Some of the footage you’ll see was shot right around here. We want you to come early to our screenings, hang out, have some barbeque and enjoy some really great movies.”
More information on the Topanga Film Festival can be obtained online at www.topangafilmfestival.com