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Community Corner

The Valley Film Festival Experience

A firsthand report on what it's like to attend the Valley Film Festival, running through Sunday night at the Whitefire theater in Sherman Oaks.

This weekend, The Valley Film Festival is going on at the in Sherman Oaks. I’ve been attending screenings there to capture the experience of a film festival right here in our neighborhood.

This 125 seat theater seems to create the perfect group of people to hang out with friends and make new ones. Some shows sold out so extra chairs were brought in. Others were a quiet, intimate group of 20-30 viewers. Both are ideal festival experiences. In the former, you get a rowdy crowd participating in the shows. A gentleman behind me whispered “not good” during the horror short Mine, so it must have really gotten to him. The smaller crowd keeps things tempered so you can pay more attention to the film, and share in a small Q&A with the filmmakers after.

The Festival creates a welcome environment when you enter. Even at capacity, a gaggle on the sidewalk never spills into the street. Lila Ahronowitz works the desk while Marciana Saint-Jean pours drinks at the small bar for donations. Kirin beer is the sponsor beverage, or a glass of wine. The theater itself resembles the makeshift theaters at major film festivals like Sundance. They often convert libraries or hotel meeting rooms into theaters, so hanging a screen in front of the stage space at Whitefire gives it a guerilla screening room feel.

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As for making new friends, I sat next to actors Justin Welborne and Karla Druege. Druege had made the plans for the night and found out about the VFF. She also told me to refer to our town as “The Shoaks.” I lived in Sherman Oaks for four and a half years and never heard that.

Perhaps the films of the Valley Film Festival won’t go on to sweep the Oscars, or even play in AMC theaters, but this is your chance to see something totally unknown. The directors of We Gotta Get Buscemi believe their film won’t screen anywhere else publicly, so VFF audiences saw the one and only theatrical screening. They do plan to release the film on YouTube to their own devoted audience, so you can look for it there if you missed it on Friday night. The trailer is at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AAV7NxxxUNA.

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Buscemi is a documentary about local filmmaker Nick James’ desperate attempts to make a film. It’s a comedy because of his own mistakes and some simple bad luck, but it got him into $60,000 debt and threatened his marriage. That is a crazy Valley story you’ll never see anywhere else.

Steve Buscemi had nothing to do with the movie, and in fact one of James’ mistakes was promising his investors the name actor. Now that the film has premiered, the big question of course is has Buscemi seen it?

“I just sent my agent Gloria an e-mail today,” James said on Friday. “I said, ‘Should we get him a copy of this because this will be the last time we see it on a screen. Maybe we can send him a copy.’ She said, ‘Yeah, we’ll get him one.’ Why, I don’t know.”

Jessica Hendrickson just moved to Silverlake and had her first movie premiere at the Valley Film Festival. She appears in the short film Dessert and Suicide from producer Ashley Cozine, director Kasey Chakos and writer Sahag Gureghian. In the dark comedy, a boy rejected by one too many girls (Hendrickson) contemplates suicide while a nearby first date conversation seems to express all that’s wrong with relationships.

As the harsh blind date, Hendrickson said she got to exorcise her bad behavior.

“I find that acting is a good way to express darker feelings that maybe aren’t so kosher to express on the street,” Hendrickson told Patch.com. “I usually try to be nice and polite in my everyday life. Sometimes we get pent up frustration and it’s a good release. My mom used to always say, ‘Save it for the stage’ if I ever got dramatic, b*tchy or just stressed out.”

The filmmakers gave a Q&A after the screenings, so you can ask them anything you wonder about the film. Gureghian explained how he found laughter in suicide.

“I know death isn’t funny,” Gureghian said. “Unfortunately I’ve experienced a lot of it and I like taking a dark subject and just poking fun and seeing what happens with it. The script was actually a little darker. He was trying to hang himself and the roof caved in on him. I was just trying to be a little outrageous.”

You can see Dessert & Suicide at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=55e8GLdZR_w. Cozine’s short that played last year’s VFF, By the Numbers, is also online at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wyna1rtfISk&feature=youtube_gdata_player.

Many of the short films come from web series, so if you’ve missed their screenings, you can still catch them online. Try www.LeagueofSteam.com or www.minglemediatv.com/CupidandErosWebSeries.html for more the VFF shorts and more from those filmmakers.

The Valley Film Festival welcomes all regions of film to visit. The Potential Wives of Norman Mao and Stalked are New York stories.

“It’s a New York story,” Stalked director Matthew Irving said. “It’s a don’t judge a book by its cover story. Just when you think you’re all paranoid, you’re in the big city, things aren’t always what they see. It’s a mix of that idea with the fact that I grew up on Twilight Zones and John Carpenter films. It’s a pastiche of all those things.”

In Stalked, a woman becomes scared when she keeps seeing a man in a pig mask on the street. Irving himself played the masked man, and the mask itself comes from the valley. “We found it at just down the street here,” Irving said. “It was around Halloween time.”

The Valley Film Festival runs through Sunday, with the cast of Bad Actress expected to attend and give Q&A. The show is already sold out, so you can try to go stanby, or just watch from across Ventura Blvd. as the celebrities arrive.

For tickets to other VFF shows visit www.valleyfilmfest.com.

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