Director looks to build momentum for indie film fest

This year”™s Connecticut Film Festival will undergo a few more changes as organizers work to hit upon the right formula for the annual event.

“We”™ve changed the model around, and it”™s coming along great,” said Tom Carruthers, director of the three-year-old festival of independent films.

A weeklong film festival has been pushed up to next May from this fall, and a program for independent musicians will be added to the mix, and a series of 16 events will lead up to the main festival.

The series begins next month with midweek events at galleries and museums followed by weekend film screenings in Ridgefield-based Bow Tie Cinema movie theaters in Hartford, New Haven, Norwalk, Westport, Greenwich, Stamford, Wilton and New Canaan. The events will start the last weekend in September in New Canaan.

The midweek events will be at art organizations, galleries and museums the festival has partnered with in previous years, Carruthers said. “They”™ll be dispersed through those eight months” between the first September screening and the main festival in May. “We”™ll have cocktail receptions and some 45-minute or hour-long screenings of shorts or animations or films from last year”™s festival.”

Carruthers said organizers expect about 800 submissions from independent filmmakers this year because of the eight-month schedule, almost triple last year”™s 300 submissions from which 40 films were chosen for screening.

“We can also be more selective. We”™ll have some killer material with no compromising at all. And filmmakers will be able to show their films in several markets all around the state.”

The main festival is scheduled for the week of May 20-25 at a city yet to be designated. “I”™m in the process of putting proposals together to pitch it to several cities,” Carruthers said, including Danbury, Norwalk, New Haven and Hartford. “We want to have a city that wants to support it financially and with in-kind help with facilities and that kind of thing. We”™re planning to become a two-week event and we want a three-year commitment from the sponsoring town.”

The May film and music festival should have a positive economic impact on the communities, including hotels and restaurants. The two previous five-day festivals both attracted several thousand people to the screenings, workshops, seminars and other festival-related events.

The May festival will include independent music as well as independent films. “I”™m working with several people who are doing the programming for performances by independent bands and musicians,” Carruthers said. “The performances will be primarily exhibition, not competition, and will be very eclectic ”“ from Celtic to ethnic to alternative music to jazz. And we”™ll have seminars and workshops for musicians.”