Members of the Women In Film Panel, from left, Jessica Janos,

Three-day festival attracts about 1,000 participants to
downtown
Morgan Hill – Going international for the first time, Morgan Hill’s third annual Poppy Jasper Film Festival this past weekend attracted close to 1,000 people and made enough profit Nov. 10-12 to “break even.”

This year’s festival budget was $75,000, larger than previous budgets to run the event, a nonprofit project under the auspices of Media Access Coalition of Central California, a Morgan Hill-based tax-exempt charitable organization. About 90 percent of its revenues come from sponsors and donations. Ticket sales represent 5 percent of its budget.

Kim Bush, chair of the Poppy Jasper Film Festival, hopes opening the event to international filmmakers will bring more exposure to the event and increase its reputation among filmmakers. She added the festival wants to stand out from other festivals by not going for “Hollywood star” appeal but rather focusing on behind-the-camera work.

“Some of the other film festivals really concentrate on the movie itself and who’s in it,” she said. “They don’t actually address the filmmaker, and that’s what makes us different. We’re promoting emerging voices. With that as our focus, it’ll be interesting to see what happens and how our festival grows in the future.”

Among several foreign movie-makers attending was Isabel Sanchez-Melo from the Canary Islands who showed her film “Lewis” about a man who believes he’s too ugly to ever be loved by a woman. She was impressed by the festival’s quality as well as the friendliness of Morgan Hill residents.

Her brother, Jose Melo who scored her nine-minute film, also felt impressed that a small town can successfully put on an international film festival. Morgan Hill’s easy-going style and proximity to San Francisco and Monterey might, over time, make it a popular destination on the film festival circuit, he added.

“It could help,” he said. “It’s very nice being here. You get to relax and meet people like you who are interested in making films.”

A Spanish-language film titled “Binta y La Gran Idea” by filmmaker Javier Fesser took top awards for best drama and best overall film at this year’s festival. Its story tells about a humble fisherman in Senegal who gets an idea to improve humankind.

The 2004 and 2005 Poppy Jasper festivals surprised many other film festivals by actually making money, Bush said. Much of this financial success came from the many local volunteers who gave their time and energy to the event.

Bush said the event’s “mission” is not to earn a profit but instead to provide a friendly forum for budding movie makers to gather and discuss their craft.

California filmmakers attending the event included Brett Burrows, a former Hollister resident who graduated from the University of Southern California’s prestigious film school. He showed his six-minute film “The Tragedy of Comedy” about a comedian who pays a high price to make his audience laugh.

At the filmmakers party Saturday night at Morgan Hill’s Granary building, the 38-year-old Burrows described the Poppy Jasper as a stress-free venue for giving young filmmakers like himself the confidence to meet with established directors and producers.

“I think it’s a budding film festival,” he said. “It offers a real close-nit and fresh experience (for attendees). I don’t think I would be meeting people on an intimate basis, as I am here, at a different bigger film festival.”

Justin Simpson, a 20-year-old Sunnyvale-based movie director taking filmmaking classes at Cupertino’s De Anza Community College, said the Poppy Jasper is the third film festival he’s attended and it has offered him a way to fun learn from others about the movie-making craft. The festival showed his 15-minute movie “Incomplete Reality” about a young hitchhiker who meets three men who might not be real.

Among the established women filmmakers at this year’s festival were Lisa Jones Johnson who is starting the Comedy Express channel on cable TV, and Louise Rubacky, a filmmaker for more than 25 years who co-wrote and co-directed the documentary “There’s Something About W” analyzing the Bush-Cheney administration. The two filmmakers discussed their movie experiences on a panel focusing on women in film.

This year’s keynote speaker was Victor Miller, a Bay Area screenwriter who created the original “Friday the 13th” film and has also written for many of TV’s daytime soap operas. He and wife Tina Miller hope to return next year as festival attendees because they enjoyed Poppy Jasper’s emphasis on short films made by independent artists.

“So much of the focus of everyone is on Los Angeles and the bottom line,” he said. “And what this film festival really brought clear to me is that filmmaking is not this arcane art that only a few people can do. You can have a really strong impact without having to spend millions of dollars to make a film.”

Miller also praised the volunteers and organizers for making the Poppy Jasper experience a pleasant one for him and his wife.

Jay Jaso, marketing assistant for the festival, said that filmmaker Jessica Janos, an alumnus of the American Film Institute Graduate Directing Program, was a “force” in this year’s festival because she brought a passion for the craft to other movie makers. Janos was a member of the women’s panel.

“She decided to do a mini-documentary of the film festival,” Jaso said. “She was taping all over the place. She made it a point to sit there and talk to people about what they’re doing and why they’re doing it.”

Festival organizers also taped an interview with Janos in which she gave them many ideas to improve the festival, Jaso said. One of her ideas is to have the festival next year borrow several Apple computers and teach children ages four to 10 how to make movies and then showing these short films at a special venue.

“She’s someone who intuitively recognizes where this film festival can go,” he said. “Filmmaking is a new way to tell stories. She made us think about a module focused on very young kids with their parents’ involvement to be part of it.”

The public can watch this year’s Poppy Jasper films on the Morgan Hill Access Television channel on cable TV and other venues, Jaso said.

This year’s festival also created a new organization called “Friends of the Festival” in which local movie buffs can help the festival out with money, in-kind donations or volunteer time. For more information on this group, check out the Poppy Jasper Web site at www.poppyjasperfilmfest.org.

Marty Cheek is a free lance writer for South Valley Newspapers.

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