The Alexandria Film Festival will run from Nov. 7-10 in several venues around Alexandria. It features high quality short and feature length films, documentaries, filmmaker panels and arts presentations. This is the first in a series of articles focusing on the background, the process and a look at the movers and shakers who make it all happen.

Executive Director Patti North

 

Q: What inspired you to start the Alexandria Film Festival 18 years ago?

Patti North: Well, at the time I was a member of the Alexandria Commission for the Arts. I had always loved movies since I was a child. I realized it was the time of DVDs; a digital revolution was happening and it was going to be big. I thought there is a whole thing under our radar and we are promoting things from the Renaissance. At the time Alexandria had a number of Ethnic festivals and I thought we could put them together in an international film festival. It worked. We did get together but they didn’t give up their individual festivals.

Q: Take me back. What was it like the first year?

North: The first year we had fewer than 20 film entries but we had some significant entries. One of the films by local filmmakers was nominated for an Oscar. It was about a music festival in Uganda and the devastating stories of the participants before then. One girl lost her parents who were slaughtered. She ran into the jungle and when she returned to her village she found her mother’s head in a cooking pot. The music festival became a metaphor for their survival. The first year we held the festival in the U.S. Patent and Trademark Office which was new and had auditorium space. It was good and bad. It wasn’t set up for film and the location was buried and a challenge to get there.

Q: How did things develop from there?

North: It took a few years to attract filmmakers to come here. But we made steady progress and some of the filmmakers returned a few different times. But there was kind of a sea change in 2012. The City was still backing us at the time, and the Office of the Arts had a very good staff person who gave us significant time, especially the three months before the Festival. Suddenly she left, and the City told us they didn’t have any bandwidth to give us anymore and if we wanted to continue we’d have to do it ourselves. At that point I was ready to let it go; there’s only so much volunteers can do. But the volunteers wanted to go ahead so I said ok. There were some advantages to not being connected with the City because it gave us a lot of freedom to choose what we wanted without worrying whether some language or content in the films would be offensive to them.

Q: What is your budget and what are your largest expenses?

North: This year the budget is $43,000-45,000. The biggest expense is venue rental. We can show films anywhere but if the venue doesn’t have the equipment, we have to bring it in but if they have the equipment, they are top dollar. AMC Hoffman is a big well-equipped theater and top dollar; Beatley Library is the most affordable. The next largest expense is marketing. I can’t believe after 18 years people still say, “Alexandria has a film festival?” The competition for people’s attention is extremely intense. If you could just run one ad, you’d do it but you don’t know what message is working to compete with everything out there. We support the Festival with a grant from the City of Alexandria and the Commission on the Arts which was $11,000 this year, and we’ve had some of our corporate sponsors for all 18 years. And our fellow citizens are loyal and generous in making sure the festival can prosper and grow.

Q: What unexpected things have happened along the road?

North: Well, Covid was unexpected but it had some dividends. We had to do two years virtual watching on the computer. But a new platform was rising up, and we had to figure out what to do. None of us is very technical but we got the ability to offer pop up films anytime and we have done that. In person is best but it doesn’t mean we shouldn't be open. Last year we had a power outage so the films had to be rescheduled until later in the day until we could solve the problem. I had eaten at a restaurant across the street and parked my car in a zoned area. When I finally left at 1 am, I found my car had been towed. It cost me $265 to get it back. One thing I didn’t expect was my new collaboration with the maestro of the Alexandria Symphony. We invited filmmakers to submit a film that would be accompanied with an orchestral piece played by the symphony. Seeing a film played in perfect synchronization — people couldn’t believe it.

Q: What is the incentive for film makers to appear in the Alexandria Festival? 

North: One of the reasons film festivals exist is to serve as a bridge between the film maker and getting noticed by the distributor. If you win an award you are not an unknown quantity anymore. We give awards at the end of the Festival in a number of different categories including Best of Festival, Best Foreign Language, Best Audience and Best Documentary Short. We don’t have any overhead with the Alexandria Film Festival since all volunteers are unpaid, and I work out of my home so we are able to keep the entry fees modest although running a festival is expensive so they aren’t cheap. Also we have a good professional reputation and the filmmakers know we aren’t going to take advantage of them. And filmmakers like to come here and spend a weekend in Alexandria hanging out with other film people and enjoying our restaurants and fun, interesting city. Frankly, other areas that host film festivals aren’t as interesting as Alexandria.

Q: What is your biggest worry?

North: At this time of the year, I try to go to sleep. This is a huge logistical nightmare. You have to have all of your ducks in a row and things have a chain reaction. You can’t promote the films until they have been accepted. So many things are closely related. The logistics of operating in multiple venues at the same time, organizing content and collateral and getting folks where they need to be at the right time is pretty challenging and to do it all with unpaid volunteers is amazing. In the longer term, I worry and hope we can always retain the theater experience; it’s not the same as watching TV. I screen some of the films on my computer but when I see them on the big screen the visual potential is “wow.” It’s really different in person. I worry about expectations falling so low that people accept artificial experiences.

Q: How would you describe the film festival?

North: We feature more substantive material so we’re not likely to get Marvel submissions. The content is driven by what we like — social justice, equality, and opening the door on a little known part of the world. We aren’t a themed festival like environment for instance. Once you do that there is new material that you have to let go, and we don’t want to do that. We focus on things like the slave trade in Alexandria’s history, our city’s grandeur but also its disgrace. You have to look at the whole picture. We want to make people think and feel.

Find out more, https://alexfilmfest.com/