Allyson West and the Cindependent Film Festival

Jacob:

Hey Jeff. Welcome to another episode of the Human Friend digital podcast. Today is a friend episode, and it’s your friend.

Jeff:

Yes, it’s my friend Alison West. She is the founder and executive director of the Cindependent Film Festival. She’s also a filmmaker in her own right, and actress and all-around great member of the community. So today we had a conversation about her journey and about the festival, which is coming up this September. Well, we’re in September. It’s coming up this month.

Jacob:

Oh yeah, it’s right around the corner. If you are listening to this, please take a look at our website and get a link directly to this Cindependent, website, cindependentfilmfest.org, where you can learn everything that we talked about in the episode. It’s gonna be very exciting. We’re very happy that she is on and it’s nice to hear. Someone doing something beyond themselves for the community of Cincinnati here, and it was a really nice story. Yep,

Jeff:

All right, so you guys enjoy. Take it away.

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Jacob:

Well, let’s, I do want to get a little bit of all the questions are about the festival, which is great, but just for a second, I do want to know who you are, so like, Can you just tell us a little bit about how you are doing all this stuff, because I don’t think you’re a Cincinnati native, you’re like a transplant, and now you’re doing this really nice thing for Cincinnati, basically, and I just want to understand a little bit of that.

Allyson:

Sure, well, let’s see, I’m from Texas originally. I came to Cincinnati for an acting degree in 2007, which I obtained in 2011, and I moved to New York with my husband, Philip, who’s You know, the best person on the planet. So it’s all, it’s all kind of tied up together because, a lot of times my personal journeys ultimately become like my professional work. And so Philip, we, you know, we were having a great time in New York, but he really missed Ohio and he really missed Cincinnati. He missed all his friends, and he moved back and I was like, bye. And then when he moved back, I realized that I actually really loved him. And so I decided that I would move back. To Cincinnati so that he could be in my life or that I could be in, and I hated it. I hated it. I was so mad at myself, yeah, I was really mad at myself falling in love because I had been doing such a great job in New York City. I loved it, you know, everything, every dream that I thought that I was going to accomplish was definitely coming true there. I was finding community and friends and people just like me, and When I realized that I would rather have Phillip be the guaranteed thing in my life, and I know that careers can change, you know, that’s just a given, that’s when I came back to Cincinnati, and I was like really heartbroken. It was this really hard time of trying to find friends when I felt super sad and everybody that I had known in college had moved. They were all on the coast

Jeff:

working. Yeah, lots of people come to Cincinnati to study, you know, whatever, acting, film. And then none of them stay.

Allyson:

Yeah, I do think it’s adjusted a bit, you know, and I met a lot of cool people like Jeff back then, that’s, that’s the time period that we met, but I was really lost as a creative because I had just studied to be a performer and I wasn’t getting hired here for theater commercials, and I didn’t have community. So I spent a lot of time being sad and ended up starting to write screenplays, and then I started producing the screenplays and directing the screenplays and You know, starting to get my hands on like shaping independent film or stories that really came from me, and it was, it’s exceptionally fun. It turns out like there’s nuance. You hear the communication tool is just like so readily available, like, you know, imagine that you have the best idea you’ve ever had, but then you have the tools to show it to somebody else and show it to them exactly the way it feels for you on the inside. It’s really, really fun. So I got bugged for filmmaking. And then I had a short film that did really well on the Cindependent Film Festival circuit and like small festivals, but it opened up these opportunities for me where the film was screened like up to 4 times a month all over the country. And so I started traveling, yes, and I would go to all these different film festivals and just kind of like, you know, I made it, you know, just it was a wonderful experience and the some of the biggest gifts that it gave to me was like, first of all, the ability to be identified as a creative again. That people were looking at me and going, that’s a filmmaker, and I was like, OK, I am a filmmaker. And then on the reverse of this, I was able to have like these really meaningful dialogues with people who liked stories and would ask me questions of work, and lots of times there were things I had not even considered, but my, like my growth as an artist was really leveling up really quickly. So then I would come back to Cincinnati. And Philip and I love going to the Bramble patch in Madisonville. We’re actually going there today because we have this 1.5 hour time period where the kids are both in gymnastics and we don’t have to be there. And that’s we sneak in a little tiny date.

Jacob:

And nice. How, how old are your kids?

Allyson:

I have a 7 year old and a 5-year-old, and they are both so funny, and they both have red hair, and we love them.

Jacob:

That’s right. I’m in the same boat. I have an 8-year-old and a 5-year-old, so I feel you. And also the bramble patch., that’s in Madisonville, right, on,,

Jeff:

on Bramble and, oh my God, thank you, Plainville.

Jacob:

Do you live in the Madisonville area? 

Allyson:

We still do, yeah, we do. We had moved over into that area when we moved back, and, I’d get back from a trip. I’d be like, oh, let’s go drink. We’d sit down because I like to kind of tell Philip all my hopes, dreams, thoughts, etc. and I just kept being like. Why does Cincinnati not have a film festival? Like this is a beautiful city. It has a world-renowned opera, ballet, you know, there’s the Aeronau downtown, there’s playhouse in the Park, there’s ensemble. There’s infrastructure in some ways for theater and the arts, you know, there’s murals blossoming, look around and no, no film. And then I also had, had really seen when I was trying to learn how to make movies. How little resources were available that I had to just start calling people, work on my project, I don’t know what I’m doing, and try to use the tools that I have, which is a good way to learn, but at the same time, I could not believe how little support or arts appreciation there was.

Jacob:

I mean, I feel like a lot of ways there’s not a lot of what you’re doing now, seeing a gap and filling it. The, the, the photography though is pretty well established in the city with like commercial photographers and all this stuff and advertising industry. Some of the creative arts that are there are really driven by where’s the money at, and we got PNG and Sintas here and it’s just

Allyson:

well, and I think too, I think that there’s infrastructure. related to independent artists and all of those other industries. Like, for example, a photographer here can take a photo, show the picture to people, sell it, make money off of it, and use that money to take another photo. But there was no infrastructure and there still isn’t, it is a problem that I’m tackling. You know, I want the same person who lives in LA to be somebody who could live in Cincinnati if they like the lifestyle. I want that person who finds a professional job and grows their skills, but sometimes works on the side and makes their little fun projects and sells them. I want that same person to be able to sell their work here in Cincinnati and therefore reinvest those. Funds back into their next project. And then what we start to do is build infrastructure that will give us different screening environments, give us resourcing and attention that will help these people find new ways of working and really learn how to collaborate with a lot of different styles and get into new mediums. And then you can just start the process all over again if we can really that pipeline out in a meaningful way.

Jacob:

Well, I think it’s really great that you’ve done so much in such a small amount of time. So how many years has this Cindependent Film Festival been going?

Allyson:

Well, we, I founded our organization as a nonprofit in 2017, and we picked a date in 2018, which was basically the latest date I could get with the cheapest price I could find at a venue. To run the first festival. And because I had done a whole round of film festing, I was able to kind of be like, here’s what I think we need, because one of the things that I think gets really missed in film festivals is how much fun they are. And, you know, you have the opportunity to go. to a film festival and have a snooty experience. And believe me, there are lots of snobby festivals out there. It’s not worth your time. And Cincinnati is a city that’s full of neighbors, and you know, we all say everybody knows everybody and it’s true. It is true. And so building a festival that would be inherently fun and help people connect was kind of the whole through line trying to figure it out. So we did the first festival in 2018. I really had no idea what I was doing, but I was doing it. We were a 3 day film festival. We invited, I think, nearly 100 filmmakers from all over the world to attend. We had attendees from Canada and Mexico, so we technically were an international film festival in the first year., we, I don’t know, we ran some master classes. I started learning how to fundraise, and I think one of the biggest things that come out of it was just the beginning of audience and development for independent film culture in Cincinnati, really starting to pull together groups of people and letting them experience this year after year after year was really important. Well,

Jacob:

that’s amazing. So

Jeff:

like RE the film community here in Cincinnati, so I mean we’re talking about like independent film, but over the past, I don’t know what decade., you see a lot of big commercial films being done here, like, what’s the interplay between those two worlds?

Allyson:

Yeah, so major motion pictures are things that, you know, that’s the Superman movie. So we have a film commission that’s run by like one person, the film commissioner, and her job is to basically, as far as I understand it, liaison with the studios and People who live in the larger industries to get those films to shoot in Ohio and get those films to shoot in Cincinnati specifically because Ohio actually has like 8 or 9 film commissioners. So collectively, you’d think we’d get a lot more projects here, but individually, You count on one hand, the number of major motion productions that swing in a town for a few days or a few weeks. Now when that happens, that’s millions of dollars for the city, millions. That’s potentially like somebody’s pay for the year, you know, like those jobs have massive budgets and massive resources to contribute to a city’s ecosystem. So that’s just good for everybody, and we are really lucky that we’ve had a film commissioner who’s been successful at landing those handful of projects every year. Now, independent film is stuff that’s made outside of a studio system, even if it does have money attached to it, let’s say $500,000 let’s say $50,000 let’s say $5000 whatever it is, it’s made from an individual. It’s basically like a direct communication of a 1 to 1. The filmmaker is generally the person that It’s like pushing play in the screening that you’re sitting in, you know, and short films and independent projects are incredibly important pieces of art, first and foremost, that they’re generally a form of expression that everybody can communicate through because everybody watches screens all the time. But they’re also really important testing grounds for somebody who wants to show off what they’re capable of and, you know, land themselves in a bigger or better job. When they want the practice of directing or the practice of doing certain jobs on set, they can give those jobs to themselves. If you do it really, really well, you start to become an incredibly adept film professional. And one of the big shifts I’m seeing nowadays is that people are no longer pigeonholed into doing like one job on set. There’s somebody like me who is a director and is a producer full time in addition to running the festival, but then also, I know how to, you know, run a marketing campaign, and I know how to edit for social media, and I know a variety of different styles and what their use of their purpose or their intention or how to be rewarded for the work on the other side, and I’m not the only person who’s like that anymore.

Jeff:

And do you think that that is a change that you’ve seen across independent film or just like filmmaking in general, cause there’s more beyond like movies and like shorts that people do in the industry. Do you see that as a trend overall or just specifically here in

Allyson:

Cincinnati? Well, I do think it’s a trend overall, but there’s a small caveat to this. So at S Independent, you know, we’re meeting up to international filmmakers annually. We got 803 submissions for this year’s festival. We have almost 200 filmmakers coming to participate in the festival that we know of directly, and across the board they are. Multi-purpose utility tools. There’s just such expertise and wealth of knowledge and people are directing it. And at the end of the day, if you want a job, you got to, you know, adopt to the job that’s right in front of you. And so people in this gig economy will look to be able to be qualified to make a living out of the jobs that they’re freelancing for. Now, the caveat on this is that I don’t live in Los Angeles, you know, I do think that the majority of our filmmakers who are living in LA also do a lot of different work, but those people aren’t. Exclusively working on major motion pictures, etc. either.

Jacob:

Yeah. Well, I’m really curious about, it’s like 2018. It is a long time ago, but it’s really not that long. And it is and it isn’t. It is and it isn’t. Anything pre-COVID feels like it’s before times,

Allyson:

but I was a different person.

Jeff:

Oh, we all were.

Jacob:

I’m interested like you were, you were talking about how this ecosystem was lacking here when you were getting started. Do you feel that as you started scratching the surface and opening up these pathways for people, a ton of people started. Coming in and being like, oh my gosh, there was this undercurrent that was here that just needed some help, or like, basically people are waking up to be like, I didn’t think I could do it. Maybe I could be in the film

Jeff:

industry. Yeah, was there a pent up demand? Yeah,

Allyson:

I think the real response is a combination of things like, yes, I do think there was a pent up demand. I think historically Cincinnati has had a lot of gatekeeping when it comes to filmmaking and film resourcing. And film communications. And because of that, I think it really didn’t support, you know, additional diverse voices in the conversation, diverse in this term just meaning more than a handful. So, you know, I’m on the scene trying to build community and have been joined by basically a community of people who want to help us see that become a reality. You know, the festival planning team now has 21 people on it, and mostly everyone is volunteering their time and their talents and their efforts and their expertise, but what we are accomplishing isn’t something that a single person can do alone. I do think it takes a really great cheerleader and a really organized leader, and that’s where I come in, but there’s a lot of this work that I don’t do. There’s a lot of work that I support and guide and cheer on. Under independence so that ultimately our big goal of, you know, connecting with the community and achieving Cincinnati as being a great home for independent filmmaking will be realized.

Jacob:

Well, I’m going to thank you from Cincinnatians. You came here and you said you were sad and you were, you’re down, and then you’ve actually said, I’m going to do something about it and make it better for everybody. it’s

Jeff:

usually not what I do when I’m feeling down and sad,

Jacob:

so no, I think most people are like, well, I give up.

Allyson:

It’s been a lot of time, but I can’t just do that for the rest of my life, you know, I have better ideas for me.

Jacob:

Yes, yeah, no, and I think it’s great. You’re really, making it happen for a lot of people. So let me hit you some classic marketing questions here about this Cindependent Film Festival. So I was looking it up and I watched your video, and I encourage everyone, if anyone’s listening, to watch that cool video, that one minute like reel, we’ll link to it. It’s fantastic. So. That’s coming up really quickly. Jeff and I have to turn around this podcast edit, lickety split. So the dates, we got September 18th through 20th, but there’s like a little bit before and maybe a little bit after, right? Yes, yes. And also I want to go back to Memorial Hall because I bet the first venue wasn’t Memorial Hall, and that’s a really cool, that’s a really cool place you have now. So first off, tell me what’s going on. Onto the three days and then talk to me about this venue history and I want to know where it was the

Allyson:

first time. You got it. Yeah. So S Cindependent Film Festival is a three-day indie film festival that runs September 18th, September 19th, and September 20th at Memorial Hall in Cincinnati, Ohio., we are a filmmaker focused festival, so there are two ancillary events. There’s a Wednesday welcome party where we are welcoming filmmakers into, you know, Cincinnati and encouraging them to make a skyline stop before the fest actually

Jacob:

begins. Yeah, and they can all be like, this is weird, but thank you.

Jeff:

You mean Gold Star, don’t you, Allison?

Allyson:

No,

Jacob:

no, we won’t promote Gold Star on this podcast. Well, we

Allyson:

can’t. And then Sunday we have an awards brunch before the filmmakers all end up traveling back home. But the stuff that happens on Thursday, Friday, Saturday is basically 9 a.m. till 2 a.m. programming, and the programming is a combination of independent films, a mixture of shorts and features that run., moderated deep dive discussions on projects and talkbacks with the artists about their work, master classes for people who are looking to learn more about filmmaking or sometimes just get a behind the scenes peek at how people do what they do. We have a horror makeup for film class this year that I’m really excited about because. It’s really cool. She, this lady Cheyenne does the craziest stuff, and it’s, you know, I am not aspiring to be a professional makeup artist, but I am curious about what she does and how she does it. We have live screenplay readings because we also accept contemporary screenplays into the festival, so then we can feature writers and Really get a whole picture of the filmmaking experience. And then there’s networking parties and red carpets at night, and there are after parties, and we just do that for 3 days. On Saturday, we get into some family-friendly programming, and we run a cinema expo, which is a giant kind of vendor market of national brands, showing off some of the latest gear and tech and demos throughout the day on their work.

Jacob:

Now, I just want to go back in time a little bit. So in the first festival, did you have expos? Did you have all this stuff? So I just want to like, what was the first festival?

Allyson:

I think there’s a little secret sauce on Thursday, Friday, Saturday, and Independent has provided two nights of lodging for every accepted project, or as many as we can since the beginning. Wow, that’s really nice. I think it’s important to have the artists speak for their work, and if you’re just a regular person out in the world. Someone says, hey, I’m gonna give you two nights of a free hotel and get yourself here. It makes it a lot more feasible for artists to share. It’s really big and it’s something that the city needs because we need that fresh flow of energy and collaboration and experience to come into the city every year, In 2018, we had the festival at the Woodward Theater on Main Street. Yeah, it was pretty great. We did still have live screenplay readings. We had a VIP room. We did have a handful of master classes, but it wasn’t as robust of a master class schedule as we have now, Yeah, man, I don’t know how we pulled that off,

Jacob:

but I think it’s fun when you see these stories where you pulled off an amazing feat to begin with, and you, you’ve created something that people are looking forward to. It would be a disappointment to lose now, right? And that’s really, really powerful. And those kind of like, trade shows, expos, all that really fosters education for everybody to actually like learn, and it’s really great because it helps the local independent if you can just, you just come and hang out. So I did want to ask if you come to Memorial Hall, so you can buy 3 days or 1 day or.

Allyson:

Different, past types, and they’re really based off of what we anticipate people’s schedules being. So, for example, if you are somebody who loves independent film and wants access to every single piece of programming available to you, and you want the best seats in the house, then the 3-day VIP pass is for you. Those are for people that are going to sit in the same space and watch movies in the theater at Memorial Hall, and, you know, become best friends with all these stickers. That’s, that’s who that pass is for. The single day VIPs, we market them as basically like good for a busy professional. They get you a great seat on the first floor and then they get you into that night’s after party. So if you’re looking to network, which is dope, which is dope, I lost my voice. Last year and the amount of work and partying to this festival, I’ve already declared that I’m taking off this Friday night this year from partying, but we’ll see, we’ll, we’ll see you, yeah, so if, if you can make it for one day and you want a really great experience on that one day, then you would get a one day VIP pass that gets you on the first floor and the most networking opportunities you can get, but If you don’t know what you’re getting into yet, if you are trying to come to see your friend’s movie, then there’s a $29 general admission ticket that gets you into everything except for like the VIP lounge and the after party for the day. You’ve got to have a badge and a lanyard for the after parties. But that’s a really good way for us to capture newbies. And sometimes we have. People say like, well, why don’t you have like individual screening tickets for individual films and projects, and it’s mostly like that because in the beginning we were playing so many films that I personally could not advertise or market every single offering that we had available. There’d

Jacob:

be a logistics nightmare. Still is

Allyson:

actually still is, and we, we also. have spent a lot of time developing the film loving community in Cincinnati and sometimes it’s easier to say like, hey, I know this is a $29 ticket and you think that you’re not going to go to anything else here, but if you pick just one more thing to go to, it’s a good price for you. If you spend, you know, 3 hours on site instead of an hour and a half, it’s, it’s gonna work out for you.

Jeff:

Yeah, and are like outside of the screenings, that’s like in the evening.

Allyson:

Well, the screenings run all actually, the main theater at Memorial Hall starts the first screening block at 10:00 a.m., and the way that I describe the screening blocks for people who may be unfamiliar is that we basically build a visual playlist, and some of the movies are feature films, most of them are short films, and so we curate a visual playlist in a short film block that runs at 10:00 a.m., 1:00 p.m., and 3:00 p.m., and then 8:00 p.m. And you just kind of sit down, watch and go along for the ride, and we generally curate my theme, so you won’t be able to like go see a block of just documentaries, but you might be able to see a block of people overcoming social or cultural struggles, and whether those are comedies or dramas or documentaries or music videos, animations or college films or professional films. Kind of like say we’ll handle that. You just sit down and have a good time.

Jacob:

Yeah, well, which one are you going to look forward to? Which one’s the one that you’re like, I need to hit this one? Yeah,

Allyson:

we have some really good feature films this year. We have a documentary called Bring Them Home that’s got Lily Gladstone as the narrator, and we have another one called Bunny Lover, which is a Sundance film where the actor Perry Young is going to come. And then there’s another feature film called American Comic that features, an actual comic in LA. And it’s kind of like a sardonic commentary on privilege. Some of my favorites are the 8 p.m. shorts blocks. On opening night, we feature a lot of like local or Cincinnati or Ohio-based films. We have 36 projects that are considered local this year. Friday night we always program a date night block, so it’s like kind of romantic and sweet. And then Saturday night, which is when our team is like the most. Wackadoo because we’ve just been, you know, bus

Jeff:

you guys haven’t slept in.

Jacob:

Yeah, I mean, after parties every night, right, at 2 to 2 a.m. or plus, and you have to wake up like it starts at 9, basically you don’t sleep.

Allyson:

It can be a lot. I’m, you know, that the last two years of doing the festival because, you know, we did a 2018 and 2019 festival, then had our COVID years. And then coming back 23, 24, and then this year’s 25, I’m kind of looking at it being like, well, I’m not as young as I used to be.

Jacob:

Yeah, it’s when you have the kids, the kids where yeah, they, they, they, they teach you that you are old slowly. There’s the, there’s this moment then you’re like, wow, we put the kids to bed and you’re like, you know what, I’m gonna have a couple beers tonight. I’m gonna have a good time, and then the next day you wake up and you’re like, can I have 12?,

Allyson:

yeah, it’s awful.,

Jacob:

but yeah, I do like that all these little like gaps in films and there’s so many things to look at. I, I do like the way that you curate them when I was looking through the list that it does feel like you can go and have an experience where you guys have done the work to make a nice thing for every viewer, and I think that’s really nice like. I haven’t been to too many film festivals, but a couple of times it was like a string of shorts, and they were just kind of jumbled up chaotically, or it was very niche into the genre, and this is, this is nice. Yeah,

Jeff:

and can we talk about how you curate in the selection process? Oh hell, I’ve sat in on some of them myself, but I want to hear about it from your perspective, not mine.

Allyson:

As the festival has gotten bigger and as our reach has gotten better, we’ve, we’ve evolved our processes over time to more align with industry standards and to have more depth and consideration because for the 2018 and 2019 festival, I had a team of adjudicators who would work with me to watch all the content that came in, but I was curating the whole festival by myself. And you know, the problems, the problems with that, right, even if you have exceptional taste,

Jeff:

you have amazing taste, perfect, flawless, no notes.

Allyson:

you know, it’s still only one perspective that you’re putting out there, so over time. We have really, leaned on our, on our community partners and peers and media professionals in the local community to help adjudicate and then potentially curate the festival. So, what we do, is when a project is received, there’s a rubric that I built in 2018, actually, that still holds up really well, and, and an adjudicator, so we have a 40-percent adjudication team, they get assigned a project by our, festival curator, Johnny Shank. So Johnny assigns out all these projects and then he manages. This team of 40 people to keep them on track and make sure they’re watching all the movies and deeply considering the work that comes to us along the way.

Jeff:

So it’s not like the Academy where, oh, we didn’t actually watch the movie, we just kind of assumed, OK,

Allyson:

perfect. And here’s the thing is that when filmmakers submit to we’re paying a fee, and I don’t want their money to go to waste, you know, it’s not an exorbitant fee, but It’s hard earned money, and they probably did this outside of their normal life, and I don’t want to waste their time. I don’t want to waste their money. So we make sure that every project is reviewed by at least 2 reviewers, and then, once the rubric does its thing, the projects that are scoring high start to trickle out. So Johnny will start to touch things that are rated like anywhere from 4 to 10. Depending on what the comments are and the feedback is from the adjudicator, because for example, somebody’s like I love this movie, and the other person’s like this was the worst movie I ever saw, obviously we need someone else to look at it, you know, and then there’s something else that our festival suffers from is that our programming team is largely the same demographic. And so we’re not really well suited to weigh in on some of the really personal, experiences or really personal stories that are being told by some of the artists in the communities that we’d like to serve. So, some films get looked at by like 4 to 7 people, while we’re making sure that the people who are watching and reviewing the projects can speak for the communities that are being You know, really uplifted in some ways. And then sometimes the movies are not perfect. So, you know, I hate to say it, but as like a professional producer and director, when it’s my turn to get a review, I’ll start at the top. Things that are rated 10, and my reviews will drop them down because I’ll be like, hey, this. The audio is actually not great. This pacing is really off, and we really need to combine the artistic with the technical process to make sure that we’re showing the best, most unique film and storytelling content that’s also hitting the highest standards. And sometimes this is really fun. You may have a film that’s not the best technically you’ve ever seen, but it’s got a great story and a unique point of view is something that you can’t avoid. You can’t forget about it. There’s this one movie called The New Raymond that’s in the festival, and I’m going to spoil it for you guys. I’m just going to do it.

Jeff:

Hey, this is Jeff chiming in from the edit room, AKA my living room. I didn’t want to spoil the movie for you guys, so I cut this part out. And

Allyson:

I was like kind of like appalled, just like, what am I? Yeah, but then the more I talked about it, I couldn’t ignore the fact that I think this team went far enough because there’s so many people who are like, oh, I made a scary movie, it’s really scary, and then you watch it and you’re like, Not really. You didn’t need go hard enough. I think it’d be hard. It is, it is, and I think and it’s a learning process that people. A lot of times they’re trying and putting things up there and you have to get feedback on whether or not it works so that you know next time you got to push it further and projects like the new Raymond. The storyline is not perfect, the technical stuff is not perfect, the acting is not perfect. It is a story that has stuck with me, and that’s something that I go, OK, we’re gonna. Yes, that was a good select. So it’s in the festival. I curated it personally. Johnny makes the majority of those selections, and I’m glad it’s there. It, it’s, it’s wild.

Jacob:

And just, just before we leave the film selection process and the grading rubric, I do want to talk about the volume that you get in. I think you said earlier you you’re like

Allyson:

803 submissions we received this year.

Jacob:

OK. And then that whittles down to 200. Well,

Allyson:

let’s see, this year, it’s usually, it’s around about 1000 projects, but we’re able to officially welcome and support about 2 actual people per project. So that ends up getting about 200 filmmakers. Now our hospitality budget varies every year. Last year we launched a membership program called Send a Fan. And that’s a way for us to again engage the community in helping us execute this year after year because it’s crazy. When I first started it in 2018, I had to fundraise and the, the work has just grown due to the natural contributions of this team over time and the price tag gets more and more expensive, especially in 2020 when a lot of our funding just disappeared. I was really committed to diversifying the revenue streams that go to support this nonprofit business and go to support this art gift, as you say, for our community here in Cincinnati.,

Jeff:

so like beyond obviously the hospitality budget for incoming filmmakers, what are some of the other things that like donations, that people make, like what does that unlock for filmmakers or for the festival? What do you get to do? Yeah,

Allyson:

well, I think first and foremost, you know, we moved from the Woodward Theater to Memorial Hall in 2023 and we came back with two days of film programming. When somebody is contributing to Sinndependent or contributing to our nonprofit, they. Literally helping us, you know, make the space that brings everybody together. Memorial Hall, we get a good deal on it because Joshua Steele and I are friends from a long time ago, and we were able to find an arrangement between our organizations that are very suitable. But at the same time, you know, it’s a large part of our budget as well. And then we bring in other professionals to teach, we bring in other professionals to moderate, we book kind of little satellite spots throughout the city to change things up every once in a while. Things like the screenplay Speakeasy, we hire real actors to come in and cold read some of those new contemporary scripts and those actors get paid. I try to make sure that when the filmmakers arrive in Cincinnati, they’re having an experience that makes them go, wow, I really Like Cincinnati and that just takes a lot of organization and sometimes a couple of drink tickets, you know, and those are things that I had to stop paying for myself at a certain point and find new ways to support the long-term sustainability of this festival.

Jacob:

So what are the ways that people can support the festival? So I can buy a ticket, but what other things do you want people to know about as ways to support, sponsor?

Allyson:

Yeah. So if someone’s just a regular movie lover and a community member and they want to support the festival, they should come to the festival. And when they’re at the festival, they should buy the t-shirt, they should Venmo us a $5 donation, they should tell their friends and bring a friend. That goes a really long way, and I’m very confident. That when somebody comes to the festival, they’ll be coming to this festival for the rest of their lives. So we want them there one time. I would love for people to sign up and join Send a Fan, which is our membership program. There’s special member perks including extended behind the scenes filmmaker stories and access that you get all year round. And we’ve been doing additional programming as well. You know, I have a, Family-friendly art installation film program at the Contemporary Arts Center. We run Send the Next now, which is a high school film program for aspiring filmmakers. We do monthly screenings year-round at the Contemporary Arts Center and with the Esquire Theaters, and The revenue that comes in from those things are things that ultimately help this team grow because we don’t plan on staying a volunteer team forever. I’m already putting in 60 hours a week on top of my full-time job and being a mother of two, you know, it’s not sustainable. So, Staying focused and having reliable organic sources of revenue in the sense of crowdfunding and incredible experience is something that’s very viable for us.

Jacob:

That sounds great. Yeah, I didn’t even know about some of the other things you just mentioned.

Allyson:

And the thing is, is that as the team has grown, as the festival has grown, we’ve attracted more talent. And as we get more talent, they’re bringing new ideas and we’re able to work together cohesively to activate those ideas that are going beyond just the festival into really this indie film movement that we have in the city. Our team, they have 3 or 4 different events going on one night.

Jeff:

Wow, yeah,

Jacob:

that’s really cool.

Jeff:

You do stuff all year, you said we do, and then it culminates obviously with the festival.

Allyson:

Yeah, yeah, I’d say it does. I actually think the festival, we call our festival season May through October because in May being like festivals come on festival, but we have our announcement release parties Independence Day at the beginning of August. We have the festival in September. We have Best of Fest screenings in October. And so the festival is a catalyst for whatever is to come next. And this is sponsors come in. The best sponsors at Sinndependent are people who are ready to talk about what’s next for them. They’re people who are ready to, you know, they see the audience, they get the vibe, they see the the excitement, and they walk into the festival knowing. That they’re going to have a really contained audience who’s excited about the things that we’re excited at. Our audience really trusts us to bring in partners and sponsors who are meaningful and doing meaningful work. And so, you know, I’m not saying I would turn down money from nearly anybody, but I have turned sponsorship dollars from people that don’t align with our values or don’t treat our volunteer team with respect. We do not have time. For people to be dicks to our team, and I’m not gonna waste my time. It’s not worth it. I’ll, I’ll find a different way to make the dollar.

Jacob:

Yeah, I think that’s wonderful. I think that’s great

Jeff:

integrity, Allison, although not surprised coming from you.

Jacob:

I think it is really good that you guys, you, you take such care at every step because it seems like, not to sound like a couchside therapist, but it does seem like this is a, a long term like growth process for you. Like you wish these tools were here when you were a filmmaker and you are making the environment that you would have given yourself. And I think that is a really nice underlying current of the whole festival. You know, I don’t see you necessarily on all these, these things front and center.

Allyson:

I try, I try as many as I can. I have to be honest with you.

Jacob:

But I, I think it’s, it’s great that you’re, you’re basically paying it forward to the community and making that thing here, which you didn’t have when you showed up. You built it and you’re attracting people from all over the world, and we got over 100 films. We got 3 days of master classes, screenplay readings, parties, and it’s like an international thing now, a very international thing now. How many countries do you have coming?

Jeff:

Do you know the furthest away someone is coming to the festival? Well,

Allyson:

this year it’s actually quite different because the United States is not granting visas for a number of makers who are trying to come in. So this has been a real problem that we faced this year that people are trying to get visas to come in and they’re not able to. So, here’s the list of countries that we have reached, the United Kingdom, Canada, France, Japan, Brazil, Australia, Iran, Poland, Italy, Hong Kong, Germany, Romania, Pakistan, Peru, Mexico, Korea, China, Australia, Vietnam, Kosovo, Taiwan, North Macedonia, Kyrgyzstan, Jersey, Iraq, India, Israel, Spain, Ecuador, the Czech Republic., Switzerland,

Jeff:

oh my God, Portugal.

Allyson:

Belgium and UAE, that’s, that was just last year’s submission buckets. It’s

Jacob:

really great. That’s so cool. I think it’s wonderful is that I’ve done very small amount of travel in my life, but I did, I did get out of the country once, and it is funny that how few people know about Cincinnati in the world. Like you tell them where you’re from, and you’re like people

Jeff:

in the United States don’t even know about Cincinnati. They’re like, where is that? I’m like it’s near Chicago, I guess.

Allyson:

The festival is a place and a space, you know, I’m thinking about this idea of paying it forward, but this festival pays it back to me directly. I have made lifetime friends out of my work doing this. I have heard other people’s experiences that have changed my perspective and changed my life. I have been hired for new projects from the work that I’m doing here, and I’m not the only one that gets this experience. For every grown-up that is trying to get themselves out of the flipping rut, all you got to do is walk through the door, because we are ready to like be somebody’s best friend and show them everybody else that we love at this festival too. It’s exciting, it’s inspiring. It’s, it’s just like a good space for getting your energy going.

Jacob:

I think it’s great. It really opens up a world that’s like truly a world of connections that could happen for people., and I think it’s amazing that you were able to cultivate it in a city that a lot of people don’t know exists in the world. And it’s great to know that there’s these people in, you know, was it Kyrgyzstan, I think was one of the ones that I was gonna say they know about Cincinnati. Look at that.

Allyson:

So we were just talking about this yesterday. our press director has on his Google. Alert set anytime Sinndependent is mentioned. The Tehran Times published an article about this film we’re playing called Raimi, which is one of my favorite films of the festival. We can’t access the article because of like the security. You know, this is

Jeff:

why you have VPNs, Jacob. He always makes fun of me for having a VPN. I’m like, I could read the article if I wanted.

Jacob:

And I’m like, I’m like, I, I’m, I’m doing all this technology stuff. I don’t really want to live in the Matrix yet.

Allyson:

I understand. Despite, you know, all kinds of new tech, you gotta hold on to real communities and real people while you can.

Jacob:

Yeah, no, totally. Well, I think, I think we hit on, well, is there anything you wanted to talk about that we didn’t,

Allyson:

I’m happy with everything we discussed. I appreciate it. OK,

Jacob:

let me give you a quick outro, and Jeff can say goodbye.,

Jeff:

Alison, this has been really fun catching up with you and hearing about the festival., and that is Cindependent Film Festival. It returns to Memorial Hall September 18th through the 20th, VIP welcome on the 17th, and an awards brunch on the 21st. Expect bold films, talkbacks, master classes, and more. Grab tickets at the festival site. Link is in the show notes.

Allyson:

Thank you. I had a great time with you guys.

Jeff:

Thanks, Alison. Thank you.