Celebrating local young filmmakers in the Kansas City metropolitan area, Reel Spirit is the youth alliance for AMC Kansas City FilmFest, the region’s largest film festival. Scheduled this year for April 14, there is still time to submit a film for competition. Reel Spirit was founded by local educators Barbara Noble, Becky Palmer, and Toni Travalent, each with a passion for video production as an imaginative medium for children. As today’s youth grow up in a visual age, it is Reel Spirit’s intent to encourage inventive involvement in the cinematic process. Through video production, the positive outcomes for these young filmmakers are priceless in terms of self-esteem, problem solving, cooperation, character building, and perseverance.

Reel Spirit Young Filmmaker Showcase provides an authentic competitive opportunity for young student filmmakers in grades 2-6 and middle school. These students are involved in the entire video production process, including creating, writing, acting, directing, filming, editing and producing their films. Entries cover a range of categories including documentary, comedy/drama, commercials, public service announcements, claymation/animation, and news broadcasts. Last year, Reel Spirit announced the addition of a new category, “Reel Spirit of STEM” (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics), through a grant sponsored by Time Warner and its initiative called Connect A Million Minds (CAMM).

This year, independent judges, all professionals in the media and technology fields, will judge the entries and select winning productions that will be shown on the big screen at AMC Mainstreet in Kansas City’s Power and Light District on April 14, 2012. Winning filmmakers receive certificates and Oscar® style trophies, along with the full “red carpet” treatment. Young filmmakers will also have the opportunity to participate in media workshops presented by local filmmakers and professionals. Reel Spirit is open to participation by any young filmmaker in the Midwest region.

Reel Spirit is proving to be the launching pad for young filmmakers. Ginger’s Encounter, one of the Reel Spirit 2010 winning entries by filmmakers Christopher and Gabrielle Dierenfeldt, was accepted and shown at the Chicago Children’s International Film Festival in October 2010 and other film festivals around the country. Another winning filmmaker, Gigi Harris, and her documentary San Mateo, has had a profound impact on the lives of people in this town on the island of Belize. Her production has been broadcast nationally in Belize and has rallied the financial support and donations to build a much-needed road to replace wooden planks over disease-infested waters in a low-income neighborhood.

Empowering these filmmakers and celebrating their cinematic visions is at the heart of Reel Spirit. We encourage all young filmmakers out there to submit entries for this year’s showcase. All entries must be postmarked by midnight March 1, 2012. For more information about the competition and showcase guidelines, including entry form, categories and divisions, visit www.reelspirit.org, email info@reelspirit.org, or like Reel Spirit on Facebook. Could 2012 be the year that you walk the red carpet?

Biehn wrote the script and made his directorial debut with this film, a suspense thriller about a ruggedly handsome recluse (Biehn) living in the woods far from civilization, when a single knock on his door throws his solitary life into chaos.

Biehn, the star of The Terminator, Aliens, and Planet Terror, attended the screening with his co-star and wife Jennifer Blanc-Biehn. Blanc-Biehn reports that Kansas City FilmFest “holds a special place in our hearts, as it’s the first place we saw The Victim with an audience and it was such a blast to see the wonderful reactions.”

Snively has just returned from Park City, where she attended a reading of the script by professionals before a live audience. The table read ran concurrently with the Sundance film festival.

Snively remembers her trip to the Kansas City FilmFest fondly. She says she had the “time of her life” and found Kansas City festival attendees very enthusiastic about independent film. A compilation of her work is now available on DVD through Camp Motion Pictures.

The locally-lensed feature film, Works In Progress, debuted at FilmFest 2010 before two sold-out audiences. Now it’s out on DVD so that even more people can enjoy the story and the chance to see Kansas City locales shown lovingly on film. It has just been released for distribution by Vanguard Cinema and is available from many outlets and Amazon.com.

The film, which has played at nine different film festivals around the country, was directed by Stephen Pruitt and written by Pruitt and his wife, Mary Settle Pruitt, both of Overland Park, Kansas. In addition to FilmFest 2010, Works in Progress has played at festivals in San Antonio, Memphis, and the Heartland Film Festival in Indianapolis.

As described by the director, Works in Progress is a poignant, romantic comedy feature film that follows the lives of two recent small-town college fine art graduates and a successful, yet unfulfilled insurance professional during a magical summer in “the big city.” The film stars local actors Christina Blodgett, Greg Brostrom and Ben Jeffrey. According to an October 23 article in the Kansas City Star, “the film’s romantic themes weren’t only in the script. Blodgett and Jeffrey met on the set and are now married.”

Works in Progress is set in the present day (with brief flashbacks) in rural western Kansas and Kansas City, Missouri.

If you would like to volunteer for the AMC Theatres® KC FilmFest 2012, please contact us!

(R to L) Rashid Ghazi, Tim DePaepe and Ash-har Quraishi at the 2011 Kansas City FilmFest

The FilmFest 2011 competition feature Fordson: Faith, Fasting, Football has received numerous awards, including the Special Grand Jury Award at the Slamdance Film Festival, Special Jury Prize at the DEADCenter Film Festival, the Audience and Founders Award at the 2011 Politics on Film Festival and other awards. Yet it may have been its screening at the Kansas City FilmFest that catapulted it to a theatrical release at multiple AMC Theatres nationwide on September 9, 2011.

“Without our screening at KC FilmFest, I doubt we would have had the opportunity to prove to AMC that we could draw audiences to our film,” said co-director/producer Ash-har Quraishi. “Seeing Fordson in one of their own theaters with a sold out crowd surely helped us make the case and set in motion our nationwide theatrical release.”

The Fordson story takes place at Fordson High School, a public school built by Henry Ford in 1922 that was once all white, but now attracts a 98% Arab-American population. The film follows four talented high school football players from the working class Detroit suburb of Dearborn, Michigan as they gear up for their big senior year rivalry game during the last ten days of Ramadan, a month when Muslims traditionally fast every day from sunrise to sundown. The film begins on September 11, 2009 and concludes at the end of Ramadan ten days later. As the Fordson team readies itself to play its affluent, cross-town rival, the film depicts a community that is desperately holding onto its Islamic faith while struggling to gain acceptance in post 9/11 America and hold on to the American Dream.

Sports fans, interfaith organizations, educational institutions and even the U.S. government have shown interest in the film. The U.S. State Department hosted a screening of the film two days before its theatrical release. At the State Department’s annual Eid dinner celebrating the end of Ramadan held that same evening, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton praised the film as a “great documentary and a great story.” The filmmakers call it an inspirational story about the American Dream that they hope everyone gets a chance to see.

For more information: www.fordsonthemovie.com

Happy New Year, a feature film that played at FilmFest 2011, has been popular with many festivals. It was part of the Narrative Competition at the South By Southwest film festival in March and won Best Actor and Best Director awards at the Rhode Island International Film Festival (RIFF) in August. It just recently had its European premiere at the Oldenburg Film Festival (often referred to as the “German Sundance”) and took home the German Independence Audience Award for Best Picture.

The film’s story centers around Sgt. Cole Lewis (played by Michael Cuomo), who is mentally and physically scarred by his time served in Iraq and Afghanistan. Despite the uphill battle he faces upon his return, he finds humanity, compassion and friendship in a group of similarly injured veterans in the psychiatric ward at a remote veterans hospital.

The idea for the story came from director K. Lorrel Manning, who originally created it as an Off Broadway play after interviewing veterans from WWII, Afghanistan, Iraq and all wars in between. With the success of this film, we won’t be surprised to see it at our neighborhood multi-plex soon.

Filmmaker Chris Brown reported that, since premiering at the 2010 festival, the film has gone on to play nearly 40 festivals around the globe and won a total of 16 awards so far. Awards include Best Drama, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actress, Best Cinematography, Best Screenplay, and Best Ensemble, to name a few. Brown says he has been reflecting on that wonderful first screening in Kansas City, where the KC FilmFest was the first festival to give the film a chance.

In the film’s story, Fanny, Annie and Danny are three troubled adult siblings brought together by their horrific mother for the Christmas holiday. Like just about everything in Brown’s work, what seems commonplace on the surface becomes riveting in the details. As with a storm building strength silently offshore, we sense the impending climax without knowing exactly when or where it will hit – or how hard.

More information at: www.fannyannieanddanny.com.

The print program used by thousands at 2011 FilmFest won a first place award in Nonprofit Connect’s 9th Annual Philly Awards Honoring Excellence in Nonprofit Communications. Jeph Scanlon, executive director of the Kansas City Filmmakers Jubilee is pictured with Dana Weaver, co-chair of the Philly Awards. The FilmFest program was recognized in the Print Magazine category of the competition at the Nonprofit Connect awards luncheon on October 18 at the downtown Kansas City Convention Center.

According to Michelle Davis, Executive Director of Nonprofit Connect, “The judging team was thoroughly impressed by the quality of the 185 entries we received this year, a new record for Philly’s entries!”

Special recognition goes to Kathy Hanis who led the team that created the program and to Bryan Colley, the volunteer graphic designer.

You’re invited to CinemaKC’s fall fundraiser, “Go to 11 on 11-11-11 with Spinal Tap.” The event includes a screening and celebration of the classic rock ’n’ roll mockumentary, This Is Spinal Tap, on Friday Nov. 11, 2011 at the Screenland Crossroads Theatre, 1656 Washington. Tickets are $11.

• Relive the sights, the sounds and the smells of Spinal Tap – including clueless guitar god Nigel Tufnel (Christopher Guest) and his collection of ludicrously loud axes that inexplicably “go to 11.”
• Party to a rockin’ live band gamely performing “Big Bottom,” “Sex Farm” and many more highly questionable Spinal Tap ditties!
• Come dressed as your favorite Spinal Tap band member or other overinflated figure from the topsy-turvy world of heavy rock!
• Enter the “Go to 11″ Spinal Tap raffle offering 11 unusual prizes riding the fine line between stupid and clever!

For more information go to cinemakc.com.

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